Employing A Sensitivity Checker

by Ariela

Old Economy Steve longs for the days when he could avoid people telling him how offensive his views are.

Sensitivity readers have been quite the hot topic in some parts of teh interwebs lately.

What is a sensitivity checker? When a creative type, in my case an artist, wants to use cultural elements from a culture not their own, you employ someone from that culture to act as an expert guide, telling you things that are important to know, and giving feedback that should help you to portray the culture in question accurately and in a way that is not offensive. This can cover anything from preventing embarrassing errors like those from our Jewish Stock Photography Fail Blog, to the horribly offensive error of making Nazis the good guys in a Holocaust novel supposedly told from the point of view of a Jewish girl (we won't link to that book, but here is a scathing review by Katherine Locke). 

In some ways, it is no different than consulting any other expert so you don't make ignorant mistakes, but here the stakes aren't just your own embarrassment but the possibility of perpetuating oppression of real people. 

I recently had my first serious sensitivity check. Our product release next week will include a picture of a keris, which is a Malaysian dagger with serious cultural significance. That's the sort of thing you don't want to just assume you can just chuck into a piece of art when you don't know anything about the culture surrounding it. Thanks to the wonders of Twitter, we were connected to Jia-Ling Pan, who was incredibly helpful. We highly recommend her, if you need a sensitivity check for anything from Malaysia. (Let us know if you would like to be put in touch; she said she would prefer a referral than a link.)

Here are a few basic takeaways from the process.

1. Pay them.

This should go without saying, but alas, it needs to be said. Giving someone a crash course in the intricacies of one's culture isn't a privilege, it is work. Listening to and answering questions, many of which may be ignorant and even offensive is hard work. Giving constructive feedback is work.

This is true for art and even more true for reading a manuscript, which takes a heck of a lot longer.

Pay them. If one cannot afford to pay someone from the culture one is writing/singing/art-ing/movie-making about to do a sensitivity check, then one doesn't get to play in that sandbox.

This doesn't mean you don't get to create, just that this particular avenue is not available. Lack of money sucks. It sucks for you as a creator, but it also sucks for people whose culture gets trampled over insensitively and are then asked to help someone else make sure they're doing it right for free. Sensitivity checkers need to be paid.

2. Listen to what they have to say, and give them space to talk.

You employ a sensitivity checker because they know things you don't. Sometimes that means answers to your questions, but other times that means telling you the answers to questions you didn't even know should be asked. Give your sensitivity checker some unstructured space to talk rather than framing everything within a Q&A. Your questions are shaped by your own assumptions after all, and they may not translate into the culture you are trying to learn about. You might even wind up getting more material out of it in ways you didn't anticipate.

3. Accept what they have to say.

Sometimes a sensitivity checker will say things you don't want to hear. You have to be willing to go into the check alert to the possibility that you might have to rework part of your project, a lot of your project, or even scrap your project entirely. The earlier you ask, the less likely this will be, so check early and often! Though even that is not a guarantee.

It's never easy to hear negative feedback, particularly when it means losing a lot of work. If you are only interested in affirmation and will come up with reasons why you don't need to take the negative feedback too, don't bother to have a check done at all. 

Mary Robinette Kowal has an excellent blog post about this. Please check it out.

4. No Group is Homogenous.

As in any group, different people will react to the same thing in different ways. Just because your sensitivity checker reads things one way doesn't mean that other people won't have a different take. Having more than one sensitivity checker is a good idea, particularly if the source material is emotionally significant or you are using a lot of it. And even if all your readers say it's fine, there's no guarantee that someone else will not be offended. Which brings us to:

5. Your creation is your responsibility.

If someone else is offended by the thing you made, even if you had a sensitivity checker, the responsibility is yours. It is not the job of a sensitivity checker to tell you how to do something so that you cannot be criticized for it; they're just there to give your their own read, and possibly make a best guess at how others may feel. The mere fact that you hired a sensitivity checker is not a shield against criticism, and if the work offends someone, then it is not the sensitivity checker's fault. It is on you to own up to any damage caused and decide how to proceed, apologize, make amends, fix it, etc.

Coda: Sensitivity checking is not a substitute for #OwnVoices

#OwnVoices is a campaign to lift up the work of people in various marginalized identities telling their own stories. It is not enough to have white people telling stories centering People of Color, or straight people telling stories about LGB people, or cisgendered people telling stories about trans people. No matter how skilled or well-intentioned the creator, they will not get it all. People have a right to portray themselves. And we should support them when they do by patronizing their work.

That said, I am very much not in the camp that says it is never okay for someone to portray a person outside their own identity. That leads to other kinds of erasure and normalizes the idea of homogenous societies. But when we do paint pictures of other people, with words or brushes or songs or cinema, we need to make sure we do it with care and respect. That's where sensitivity checkers are so important.

Find a Sensitivity Checker for Your Own Work

There are lots of people out there who do this work. Writing in the Margins is a great directory if you are looking for someone to keep you from accidentally putting your foot in it.

We Used Up All Our Sick Days...

A large blue plush version of the rhinovirus, accompanied by a blue tinted microscopic image of same. Image courtesy of ThinkGeek, where you can buy this cutie.

by Terri

...so we're calling in dead. Both Ariela and I are getting over various forms of rhinovirus, and Monster* decided to celebrate Daddy coming back from California by running a nasty fever. So neither of us has the brainpower to be clever at our wonderful public. We'll be back next week to talk about the importance of employing** sensitivity readers.

*My 3.5 year old daughter, whom I do not publicly name on the internet

**Employing being the operative word

Jewish Stock Photography Fails

by Terri & Ariela

The world of stock photography is an inherently odd place to visit. Where else can you get photos of kitchen demolition side by side with any flower you could possibly think of? 

Themed stock photos can get... interesting. Just typing "$_HOLIDAY Stock Photos" into a Google Image search can set off nightmares or fits of giggles. Really, there are things that should never be Earth Day themed. But when you start searching for stock photography of non Christian religious holidays, the photos don't just look strange, they look like an alien's attempt to pass as a Hyoo-man. For example, there seems to be a compulsive need to put either matzah, a tallit,* or a Ḥanukkah menorah in almost all of them to scream JEWISH very loudly. Even if the image is tagged for a holiday containing none of these ritual objects or foods. Like Tu B'Shvat.**

Ariela's day job involves email marketing for the Union for Reform Judaism. This means finding images to go in said emails and results in her spending a lot of time combing through stock image catalogs, particularly around Jewish holidays. This, in turn, led to her IMing Terri in fits of disbelief so that someone else could share in the WTF-ery.

But why should we limit the horror to just the two of us? So we present: Bad Jewish Stock Photography. And when we say bad, we mean REALLY BAD.

We have not included images in this post that are just mis-tagged, like when you search for Passover and get Easter results. That's wrong and sometimes offensive, but not what we're listing here. All photos are watermarked with the image source, unless we can no longer find them at the source. We acknowledge that this post is very image heavy. The captions contain the best descriptions we can write, the commentary on the images is in the body text of the blog post below them.

And yes, we know about this article in The Forward. But that photo isn't even the tip of the Jewish stock photography fail iceberg. It's a small chip off the glacier.

Image shows an open Hebrew prayerbook on a stand, a blue velvet kippah with silver embroidery, a ḥanukkiyah with all its candles lit, and a folded tallit with black and silver stripes.

This one originally came from iStock, but can no longer be found there. The lit ḥanukkiyah with the tallit is bad enough - a tallit is worn during the day and the ḥanukkiyah is lit only at night - but if you look closely at the text of the open book, it is open to the evening service for Yom Kippur, i.e. not a text you would ever need at Ḥanukkah. Anyone who knows any Hebrew could have told them not to do this.
This was the photo that originally inspired Ariela to do an ongoing series on bad Jewish stock photography.

Image shows a wood framed slate with "HAPPY PASSOVER" written on it in stylized chalk lettering. Surrounding the frame clockwise from noon are: pieces of square machine made maztah, un-shelled walnuts, a red-brown haggadah, red tulips with yellow stripes, a wine glass on its side with a splash of wine still left, a bottle of pink wine on its side, a stack of three round hand made matzahs on a white cloth, more un-shelled walnuts, a leaf of lettuce with an egg on it, and more tulips.

It's Passover, not Easter. Why the tulips? Also, why is a mostly drunk wineglass lying on its side? How is that happy?

Image shows an older balding man wearing a tallit and holding an open siddur standing next to a table. To his left is a seated woman with short hair, to her right is a young boy in a sweater vest, button down shirt and Hanukkah themed suede kippah. To the right of the older man is a seated man in a long sleeved polo shirt with a red satin kippah. There is someone seated next to this man, but the image cuts off everything but some arm in a blue sleeve. On the table is a silver plate with square machine made matzah and an unlit ḥanukkiyah with all of the arms holding blue and white striped candles.

The image description for this photo on Thinkstock is "Parents and their son and a rabbi at a Hanukkah ceremony." Just what is a Hanukkah ceremony, pray tell? There is very little to say about this image that the provided description doesn't cover. The words, they escape us.

Image shows a tallit with blue and gold stripes over white painted wooden slats. Positioned over the tallit are (clockwise from top): glass bowl with honey and wooden dipper, two broken sheets of square machine made matzah, a ḥanukkiyah lying flat on its side, a shofar, and a silver kiddush cup partially filled with wine and sitting on a silver coaster.

The only thing this picture illustrates effectively is "We have no meaningful understanding of Jewish holidays."

Image shows a lit red pillar candle sitting on the pages of an open Hebrew prayerbook.

No. Just no. You might wish to pray by candlelight, but if we ever catch you with a lit candle on your siddur, we will hurt you.

Image shows a tallit with blue and gold stripes on a rough wooden surface. Arranged on and beside the tallit from left to right are: a teal suede kippah with a silver border, 4 mostly empty silver kiddush cups in a diagonal line, and a shofar.

Once again, juxtaposition fail. One does wear a kippah to the Passover seder, but not a tallit. And a shofar isn't a Passover ritual object at all.

Image shows a blue and gold striped tallit (with atarah showing this time, for variety) on wooden slats. Over the tallit are (from left to right): a shofar, a black suede kippah with a gold border embossed with Jewish stars, and matzah. Once again, juxtaposition fail.

This is a whole genre. See more here. 

The Crown Jewel of the Collection

This has been scrubbed from all the stock sites we could find. We don't blame them. What the heck were they thinking?

Yes, that is a model of the Ark of the Covenant positioned next to a piggy bank sporting clovers and "good luck" painted on its side. The two are positioned so that the carrying rod of the ark appears to be jammed up the piggy's butt.

There was another in this same series that showed the same model of the Ark perched on the top of someone's foot with what appeared to be an industrial site in the background. We don't understand.

We have never run across any other Jewish Stock Photography fail so egregious, and we hope we never will.

*Prayer shawl worn by Jewish adults during daytime services. It is only ever worn at night once a year, on the eve of Yom Kippur.

**The 15th day of the month of Shvat (lunar month, generally falls around February). Often referred to as "Jewish Arbor Day," the Talmud lists this date as "the new year for trees." In the Mediterranean, this is often the beginning of springtime. It is celebrated by eating dried fruit and planting trees.

Did you enjoy this post? Help us keep writing more of them.

New Greeting Card: Covertly Hostile Mother's Day Card

As Mother's Day approaches we introduce a card for those whose relationship with their mother is painful and sometimes even hostile. Use the language of flowers to quietly say how you really feel while outwardly obeying your obligation to express affection.

While Mother's Day is touted as a time to celebrate your mother as the "best mom ever," for many people it serves instead as a painful reminder that their mother is neither good to them nor good for them. Unfortunately, it is not always possible to disengage from toxic moms, and going through socially mandated demonstrations of love is extremely painful when they are so at odds with your emotional reality. We wanted to create a card that would be a little less painful to give, because it would, secretly, convey your true feelings.

This card is a sharp departure from our usual, cutesy chibi card style. Instead it is designed to blend in with the drugstore pack and look entirely unexceptional. Terri described it as filling a niche Hallmark refuses to create, despite the fact that it is their advertising that changed card-giving from a nice gesture on the holiday to a social norm.

The card features two flowers. Lavender means distrust, and tansy means resistance or a declaration against the recipient. But your mother doesn't need to know that. Also, due to the proliferation of flower dictionaries, it is possible to come up with many alternate readings that are completely innocuous, giving you plausible deniability.

Card is $4 and comes with a pink envelope.

Unfortunately, gender stereotypes have thus far defeated our efforts to come up with a Father's Day equivalent, as giving a card featuring flowers to your horrible dad would definitely not count as "flying under the radar." If you have any suggestions for what we might do to offer a Father's Day equivalent, please contact us.

How Movies (and TV) Fail at Writing with Quill Pens

by Ariela

I don't know of any profession that feels it is well and accurately represented by pop cultural portrayals. Lawyers complain about courtroom dramas, police complain about crime procedurals, etc. So it probably won't surprise you that media portrayals of people writing with quills are, well, less than realistic.

Exhibit A:

Hermione Granger, portrayed by Emma Watson, using a quill all wrong.

I love me some Harry Potter, but the quills in the movies make me growl inarticulately. I mean, leaving aside the fact that all quills in the HP universe must be enchanted, because there is no other way that a child who grew up using pencils and biros (ballpoints, for those of us reading the US editions), could possibly just pick up a quill and write with it. No chance. 

Feather anatomy, courtesy of Ask a Biologist, Arizona State University

*ahem* As I was saying, the movie's portrayal of writing with quills is actually pretty standard for onscreen depictions. And it's wrong. Those super wispy bits down by Hermione's hand are called the downy barbs, and I don't know of any scribe who doesn't trim those away. Apart from making the quill harder to grasp, they will pick up ink every time you dip your nib. Yuck. Most of us trim further up the shaft as well, right into the vane (see handy guide to parts of a feather). Some trim all the barbs away and leave the pen as just the central shaft.

Also, most of us clip the opposite end of the quill. Writing with a pen that has an overlong barrel will unbalance the pen, whether it's a felt-tip or a quill. And, depending on how you sit while you write, you might wind up poking yourself with the opposite end in the eye or up your nose. Yeah, not fun.

An illustration of the issues mentioned above. Using a quill that hasn't been properly trimmed is terrible.

Yet pop culture persists in this myth, and I persist in being cranky about it on Twitter.

So piqued by it was I that, while wandering the National Gallery in London last month, I started snapping pictures of paintings of people writing with quills. Since these paintings date to times and places when people actually used quills, they're all correct depictions. I had thought that it would make a good tumblr - Paintings of People Depicted Using Quills Correctly - but I was prevented from starting it by my utter bewilderment at the tumblr interface. (Anytime anything gets posted to tumblr for Geek Calligraphy, Terri is the one doing it. G-d bless managers.) But Mary Robinette Kowal suggested that I could make a Pinterest board instead.

So, behold:

There's not a whole heck of a lot there yet, but it will grow.

Also, as a bonus, please enjoy pictures of these souvenir "quills" which I found in the Tower of London gift shop. Appropriate placement, really, as these are not writing devices but torture devices. [cowers]

The image does not properly convey the terrible quality of the metal pen nib slapped on the end of this "plume."

Yes, that's a ballpoint shoved in the end of this quill. Because the untrimmed shaft wasn't enough.

New Greeting Card: Parents' Day Card

by Terri

Did Hallmark neglect to create a card for your non-binary identified parent? Are you forever searching for a less saccharine card to acknowledge those who may have acted as a parent to you though not precisely family? Spoon Dragon is here to help!

How it came to be:

Both Ariela and I have lamented the sameness of the Mother's and Father's Day cards currently available. We wanted to have a card that had imagery that spoke to geeky kids and geeky parents alike, knowing that those don't always overlap in the same family. Also, sometimes your geeky adult isn't your biological parent. That doesn't make the mentor or parental role in your life any less, and it's natural to want to give them a card at this time of the year. Families come in all sorts, and we wanted to make a card to acknowledge the wonderful relationships that are parental, even if they are not with a mother or a father.

So we turned once again to Spoon Dragon. This time they are in the company of a griffin who seems to be Spoon Dragon's parent.

We have deliberately created this card without gendered terms, equally applicable to parents of any gender, or to anyone who fills a parental role in your life. The interior text doesn't mention a specific Hallmark Holiday, and really is appropriate to any time of the year that you want to acknowledge a person to whom the card applies.

The card is $4 and comes with a white envelope.

Off For Passover!

by Terri

Tonight begins the Jewish holiday of Passover, or פסח in Hebrew. As this post goes live, I am in a car on my way to my mother's home in New Jersey for the seders. Ariela is in Boston with her parents. While we will be accepting orders, shipment will be delayed until after the holiday is over on April 18. There will be no blog post next Monday. 

Normal business (including our April product release) will resume on April 19. For those celebrating, we wish you a חג כשר ושמח.* Everyone else, enjoy your bread. We'll see you on the other side.

Chibi Terri cooks for Passover. (Chibis are really not proportioned to stand at stoves.)

*Khag Ka-sher Vi-Sa-me-akh - A happy and kosher/correct holiday

Love Interests and Agency in the Face of Adversity: Analyzing Lois McMaster Bujold Characters

by Ariela

Be warned, this post contains spoilers for Mira's Last Dance, and everything else written by Lois McMaster Bujold.

This post did not turn out the way I thought it would. I have been wanting, for a few weeks, to burble about Lois McMaster Bujold's latest novella, Mira's Last Dance, the Penric series in general, and LMB's ouvre as a whole. I was all set to talk about how LMB writes male protagonists interested in women, but that the women they are interested in are not Love Interests but rather fully-realized characters with their own motivations and how awesome that is. Shortly before I could take some time to sit down and write it, Lindsay Ellis came out with a review of Beauty and the Beast and why it is not about Stockholm Syndrome but does have a bunch of other problems. At 14 minutes in, Ellis starts a thought that culminates in this quote:

Ouch.

"Thrown into circumstances which they must then survive" sure sounds like it describes a lot of LMB's love interests. (Note, this is female characters who are not the primary protagonist and are the subject of romantic interest by the male protagonist; Cordelia Vorkosigan, Royina Ista, and Fern Bluefield aren't included.) But does the first part apply? Let's take a look.

Love Interests or "Love Interests," And does that Preclude Agency?

I'm going to start with Miles Vorkosigan's love interests, because for me the Vorkosiverse is the baseline of LMB's writing.

Elena Bothari

Elena Bothari

Miles' first love interest, Elena, is definitely born into circumstances which do not endow her with much agency. The daughter of a deeply disturbed father who views the degree of her success at the societally prescribed female role as the measure of his redemption from his past sins, she is also the foster daughter of Cordelia Vorkosigan who views Barrayaran society with a mix of anthropological indulgence and Betan horror. The social messaging surrounding her says that the only worthwhile vocation is to be a soldier, but bars her from enlisting by sex. Barrayar is, to Elena, a situation to be endured.

Miles creates the Dendarii Mercenaries for a whole host of reasons, but in the processes uses them to gift Elena with her childhood aspiration of becoming a soldier. But Elena does not then turn around and fall into his arms. She takes the opportunity he offers her, but refuses to be beholden to him for it. Instead, she marries someone even lower on the Barrayaran social ladder than she, a deserter; someone who has been completely excommunicated by Barrayaran society. Marrying Baz is a complete repudiation of her father's expectations of her, but also of the narrative's expectations of her as a Love Interest.

Later on, in Memory, Elena quits the Dendarii as well.

"All my childhood, all my youth, Barrayar pounded into me that being a soldier was the only job that counted. The most important thing there was, or ever could be. And that I could never be important, because I could never be a soldier. Well, I've proved Barrayar wrong. I've been a soldier and a damned good one...And now I've come to wonder what else Barrayar was wrong about. Like, what's really important."

Elena was certainly born into circumstances she needed to survive, but when she was offered an out, she took it. And after some time, she also re-evaluated her life goals and changed direction. This doesn't sound to me like a character lacking in agency.

But Elena was never actually Miles' lover. Let's take a look at some others.

Elli Quinn

Elli Quinn

Quinn is the one on this list who fits neither clause of Ellis' statement. She is not put in circumstances she is forced to survive more than any other mercenary. She chooses to be a mercenary, chooses to become Miles' lover, and when he leaves the mercenaries, she refuses to go with him. She wants Miles on her terms or she won't have him. While her motivation is never delved into much, she clearly loves her job and wants to do it to the best of her abilities. She will not sacrifice her career or herself for a boyfriend. Quinn has as complete agency as anyone can who chooses to live in a society with rules and in relation to others.

Sergeant Taura

Taura

Taura is in many ways Quinn's polar opposite on this scale in that she gets to choose almost nothing. Bred as an experimental genetically-engineered super-soldier, she grows up as a prisoner. When she meets Miles, he is on a mission to retrieve her creator and kill her, or rather, recover the tissue samples her creator had stored in her and dispose of the evidence. Miles offers her the chance to leave the Dendarii at Escobar after her rescue, but considering that would leave her in a strange society, knowing no one, with no coping tools, it's not surprising she refuses. She is bred to be a super-soldier, after all, and she does grow into her role in the Dendarii. Later she sets out to live life as fully as she can and seems to succeed. Based on characterizations, if she decided later that she wanted to give up mercenary life and take up woodworking, or anything else equally disparate from being a soldier, I believe Miles would have supported her fully. But the fact of the matter is that of his love interests, she seems to be the least independent, to have her choices most constrained by circumstances. I don't think this necessarily makes her a less realized character, but in light of general trends of the narrative arcs of female characters, it's kind of troubling.

Ekaterin Nile Vorvayne Vorsoisson

In many ways, Ekaterin is the embodiment of the kind of female story arc Ellis named in the quote up top. We first meet her trapped in marriage with an emotionally abusive man, held to it by her son, her social conditioning, and her family's expectations. It is the quintessential circumstance a woman is forced to survive in the Western narrative. When her husband is killed, the range of possibilities available to her opens up somewhat, but when she returns to Barrayar in A Civil Campaign, her family promptly tries to marry her off again, being unable to conceive of her in any role other than wife and mother.

While she has more options in A Civil Campaign, she still feels herself to be in very straightened circumstances. Miles, having apparently learned nothing since his effort to give Elena a military career, attempts to give Ekaterin a career in gardening, or at least a jump start on one, as a ploy to keep her close to him. His plot comes apart, he asks her to marry him at entirely the wrong time, and Ekaterin feels backed into quitting both the garden project and her association with him lest she lose her independence. This is one of the points where Ekaterin's agency becomes apparent: her rejection of her other suitors up until this point could have been a plot device to have her end up with Miles, but here she shows that it's an intrinsic character trait. But honestly, while it's agency, it's really minimal agency. She has said no to Miles, but she has not had any chance to say yes to herself yet.

Ekaterin does eventually choose Miles after her family forbids her from interacting with him. Ekaterin herself lampshades the reverse psychology involved by comparing it to how her son carried on about toys. And ultimately she chooses him not because she feels backed into a corner by her family but because she decides that Miles can aid her in her self-actualization, now that he has been talked out of trying to do it for her. Still, the lack of exploration of other options for Ekaterin in the narrative - aside from her insistence that she is going to remain single, which is brushed off by all the other characters - is troubling. We do see her stand up to Miles in later books, but "I can stand up to my husband" is not much of a life goal.

Ivan's love interest: Akuti Tejaswini Jyoti ghem Estif Arqua

Tej

Like Ekaterin, half of the story of Tej and Ivan's romance is from Tej's point of view. And the main character arc of the story is hers: how will she reconcile the demands her family places on her with her own inclinations? Ivan's arc, realizing that he loves Tej and enjoys being married to her, then trying to get her to stay with him, is not nearly as interesting.

Tej almost seems like an answer to the profusion of Strong Female Characters TM* that we have in the genre. Tej's family wants her to be a Strong Female Character TM (for their purposes, of course), and she wants none of it. Her self-actualization involves sitting on a beach drinking fruity alcohol and reading. Her character arc highlights the difference between action and agency. And marrying Ivan is not the way she fulfills herself; the way she does that is by refusing to go back to Jackson's Whole with her family. If anything, Ivan is the reward she gets for standing up for herself.

So ultimately, Tej is not a standard Love Interest with no motivations of her own, nor is she a woman who lacks agency and must merely endure. She surely has to endure at the beginning of the story, but it is the same sort of endurance any hero might have to undergo whose character arc is started by the murder of their family; the difference is that LMB doesn't give short shrift to the emotional toll and the exhaustion such a tragedy would evoke.

Not Pictured Here

I'm going to skip Rowan Durona, who is only briefly present in the narrative of Mirror Dance, Beatriz from The Curse of Chalion, because she very nearly is a standard Love Interest off the assembly line, and Ijada from The Hallowed Hunt, because I didn't actually like that book all that much. Which brings me finally back around to the character who inspired this post in the first place.

Nikys Arisaydia Khatai

Nikys Khatai

When we are first introduced to Nikys, she has definitely been thrown into circumstances she must survive. Her husband, chosen for her by her brother, has died after a long, lingering illness. Now a ward of her brother's, she endures his imprisonment on false charges and his refusal to take advantage of her attempt to rescue him. And then she must endure the flight to save her brother's life, to a destination not of her choosing.

At the end of Penric's Mission, it seems like she will end up together with Penric. At the end of Mira's Last Dance, it seems like she has declined, but Penric is staying to pursue her. But while she exercises a choice not to follow Penric back to Adria, it seems like a choice made from a place of fairly profound powerlessness. She is, ultimately, being asked to choose between following her brother or following Penric, with no option to follow herself.

No, Nikys is not a standard Love Interest in that she is a fully realized character with her own desires and motivation, but of all the women listed here, she seems to be the one most lacking in agency. Nikys seems to fit Ellis' description of women's narratives.

My Fave is Problematic. Now what?

Cover of Mira's Last Dance by Lois McMaster Bujold

There really ought to be a "My Fave is Problematic Dance." Whenever I realize something uncomfortable about something I love, I am taken with a desire to run away, and frequently I do put down the book, or pause the movie/tv show, and take a lap around the room before coming back. It would be a lot easier if there were a short dance I could do that would also communicate to anyone watching why I suddenly have shpilkes (Yiddish for "nervous, restless energy").

But after I would do that dance, I would come back to the thing, whatever it was, that I put down, because it is okay to like problematic things. Sometimes the good aspects outweigh the problematic ones enough that it doesn't stop you from enjoying something. And that's okay! Just don't pretend like the problematic parts aren't there. And maybe also seek out some works that are not problematic in that way (though they may be problematic in others).

Speaking of different ways to be problematic, a word about the criteria used in this post. When Lindsay Ellis referred to the troubling trend of women's narratives involving less agency and more survival, it was not a blanket condemnation of survival narratives. Survival narratives, where characters are thrown into untenable, uncomfortable, or even lethal situations they must then endure can be fascinating! For people suffering oppression in particular, such narratives can be empowering because they recognize the truth of their experiences and the strength it takes to persist in such circumstances. Problems arise when those are the only narratives told about certain classes of people.

I adore Lois McMaster Bujold, and she is generally quite good about not writing Love Interests TM who are woman-shaped props in the narrative there for the male hero to win. But it would be nice to see her write some more narratives where women aren't merely enduring. Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen was a lovely break from this pattern. More, please! (Also more non-white, non-straight, non-cis protags, too, while we're at it. A Bel book, maybe?)

My Garden, Let Me Show You It

by Terri

A collage of washcloths, tawashi,* and a bath mat in progress

The tail end of winter in Boston can drive me a little nuts. The weather gets warm, then cold, then it dumps a whack of snow on you in mid-March. I cope with this in one of two ways. Either I start a bunch of knitting projects, or I start some seeds. This year, I went on a washcloth knitting binge AND started 5 small trays of seeds.

I'm an incredibly amateur gardener. I pretty much choose seeds based on "will the resultant plant produce edible food" and "will that food look pretty.**" Hence my ordering of purple basil seeds, choggia beets, three different colors of cherry tomato, and multiple colors of pod beans & snow peas. My garden is run on the principles of watering when I remember to and fertilizing sometimes. I'm usually really good about starting seeds and shepherding them to seedling stage, then getting them into pots. Typically, small animals will get the seedlings, then I go to a nursery and buy bigger ones. Eventually, the plants will produce very small amounts of fruit or vegetables, which we will eat as they are picked. 

I'm trying a little something different this year. I'm being helped by the prolonged cold snap, as I can't actually plant out any of the seedlings that are trucking along on my office window. I'm trying to leave the seedlings indoors as long as possible, to ensure that robust plants are what go outside. Also, it's nice to have some green in the office.

So here's my garden. I'm hoping to enjoy it more in the coming months:

Incredibly shaky panoramic image of all the seedlings on the windowsill. There are cucumber, squash, pea, tomato, shallot, carrot, scallion, beet, various herb and flower seedlings poking up their heads.

Close up on the pea seedlings. I have a feeling that these will do just fine, and that they'll be accompanied by some wonderful friends. There's also a cucumber seedling.

*Tawashi is the Japanese word for small cotton cloths used for face cream and makeup remover. I'm trying to knit my own and thus not need to go through throwaway cotton pads.

**Seed catalogs are my nemesis. 

Visitor Friendliness and Hostility: On Airports and Disneyland

by Ariela

My geekery takes a lot of forms. I like things that are considered culturally geeky: comics, SFF, etc. I also have a day job in tech. But today I want to geek out about something I haven't spoken about much on this blog: usability.

In between aspiring to be a professional artist when I was a child and then circling back around to actually become one as an adult (with an ongoing dog-leg into non-profit technology), I spent my high school and college years wanting to go into exhibit design for history museums. This meant that I spent some time learning about visitor flow in physical spaces as well as in websites.* Since I spent a week in London recently, I thought a lot about usability in the real world, between doing touristy stuff at historic sites and museums and flying in and out.

Heathrow security prep station. This photo is from futuretravelexperience.com. I did not get my own as I didn't want to hold up a line by taking photos.

Let me say, for all the terrible things that people say about Heathrow, I found it quite visitor-friendly. Before going through security, they have preparation stations set up. They're little counters where you can sort your stuff out. They not only have trash cans, they also have designated receptacles where you can dump liquids out of your bottles, and they have plastic bag dispensers for your small liquids. At security itself, the bins are bigger than in American airports. Not only that, but instead of having carts of them at the head of the line, the empties are returned to the start point by gravity rollers underneath the conveyor belt that brings the full ones through the screener. They had security personnel at each conveyor belt assisting you. Oh, and you get to keep your shoes on. It not only made the onerous process of going through security rather less terrible, it also made it faster, so there wasn't much of a wait.

This image of dense crowds at an airport is from TravelAndLeisure.com. Sure looks leisurely to us. Oh wait, no it doesn't.

Contrast this to an American airport. There's nowhere convenient to prepare to go through security. There's nowhere nearby to dump liquids, which means that the person who inevitably forgot to empty their water bottle has to run back to find someplace, holding up the line. They certainly don't provide plastic bags for small liquids either. No one assists you as you prepare your stuff to go through the screener - the security personnel near that side of the conveyor belt tend to walk around shouting reminders to put your laptop in a bin by itself, etc. There's no automatic return of bins, so that can be another holdup. It's not actually designed for maximum inefficiency and misery during the process, but it seems to come close. Nobody likes being in an American airport, and security is everyone's least favorite part.

Water fountains for people of all heights in California Adventure.

If I had to name the opposite of an American airport, I would choose Disneyland. I went to Disneyland for the first time in September 2016, and I was blown away by the user-friendliness of the place. A lot of this was just because it was actually designed with the idea that people who aren't adults have a right to be accommodated. There were changing stations in all the bathrooms, usually multiples. Water fountains came in several different heights. As an adult who needs shoes to see 5' tall, believe me, there's a difference in the comfort of seats designed for multiple heights and ones designed for the average adult. But a lot of it has nothing to do with children.

I can't speak to the actual accessibility of Disney for people who are vision, auditory, or mobility impaired, but I sure noticed all the notations on the map about accessibility, pictured below. The fact that it was there up front, as opposed to having to go looking for it to learn about it, impressed me quite a bit.

Map of Disneyland with a legend on the right highlighting ALL THE SERVICES. Click to embiggen.

This is a text payphone! How cool is that? So necessary for anyone hearing impaired who doesn't have access to a cell for whatever reason!

Disposal cans at Main St. USA

The trash cans are a thing of Disney lore. Websites give conflicting stats, usually citing either 20 or 30 steps maximum between trash cans. I didn't stop to count it out - my poor spouse had to wait for me to take pictures of them, I suspect neither he nor the other visitors would have appreciated me stopping to measure out paces between each of them - but they appear at much shorter intervals than I have ever seen trash cans anywhere else. The same websites cite Walt himself as instituting the policy of so many trash cans as part of lowering the bar to guests throwing out their rubbish properly. I suspect that we don't see this outside of Disney not because institutions are not interested in lowering the bar to using trash cans but because of how many staff hours it would take to empty that many cans. Space might also be a consideration, too, as who wants to give that much footprint to trash cans?

One type of space that the trash cans at Disney don't take up so much is visual space. They are incorporated into the decor of the attraction, so they don't stick out as utilitarian, they're part of the experience and novelty. The other place Disney does this really well is in the waiting areas to get into rides. Like airports, Disney hosts people who inevitably spend a large amount of time waiting in lines. However, unlike airports, Disney tries to make this wait time as pleasant as possible, and they dress the waiting area in decor matching that of the ride, essentially trying to make the wait itself part of the ride, too.

Of course, airports can't make your wait more entertaining by making the waiting resemble being on an airplane because the vast majority of fliers are far more interested in their destination than the ride. But there are definitely things they could do to make the wait, and the ride less miserable. Unfortunately, there's no incentive to do so. People don't pay to use airports, they pay the airlines, and no airline is going to spearhead improvements in the general airport when they won't inspire anyone to fly with them more often. In fact, there's incentive not to improve, as that "calculated misery cost" is what causes people to pay for things like TSA PreCheck and visitor lounges. Ditto coach vs. First Class on the planes themselves.

There isn't really a point to all this rambling, except to say that user-friendliness has a lot of aspects and that they can make a huge difference to our experiences, even for something as simple as waiting in a line. Necessary but unpleasant experiences can be mitigated by user-friendliness, while good experiences can be enhanced; conversely good experiences can be soured by user-hostile environments and bad ones are transformed from annoying to miserable. This is true on the web as well as in the real world, but I rarely see people comparing the two outside of niche interest sites.

So next time you have a really unpleasant experience somewhere, ask yourself if there's something that could be done to make it more pleasant. If possible, give feedback on it; few places are as user-hostile as airports, and many want to make themselves more welcoming.

*If you ever see me in a museum exhibit, you may find me staring at the ceiling to check out their lighting configuration, or critiquing the layout of object labels.