NOTE: This actually looks better in my LiveJournal. The Gneech.com posting munges the format something awful.

And it’s upon us another year!

Look to the sky
way up on high
There in the night
stars are now right

Eons have passed          Fear
now then at last          the
prison walls break        Old
Old Ones awake            Ones

They will return          They                     Fear
Mankind will learn        will                     the
new kinds of fear         re-                      Old
when they are here        turn                     Ones

They will reclaim         They will reclaim        They will reclaim         They will reclaim
all in their name         all in their name        all in their name         all in their name
Hopes turn to black       Hopes turn to black      Hopes turn to black       Hopes turn to black
when they come back       when they come back      when they come back       when they come back

Ignorant fools            Ignorant fools           They                      Ignorant fools
Mankind now rules         Mankind now rules        will                      Mankind now rules
where they ruled then     where they ruled then    walk the                  where they ruled then
It's theirs again         It's theirs again        Earth again               It's theirs again

Stars brightly burning    They will return         Stars brightly burning    They will return
boiling and churning      Mankind will learn       up in the gloom           Mankind will learn
bode a returning          new kinds of fear        bode a returning          new kinds of fear
season of doom            when they are here       season of doom            when they are here

Scary scary scary         They                     Look to the sky           They
scary solstice            will return              there up on high          will
very very very            They                     Stars brightly burn       re-
scary solstice            will return              Old Ones return           turn

Up from the sea           Bring-                   Bring-                    Bring-
from underground          ing                      ing                       ing
down from the sky         cer-                     cer-                      cer-
They're all around        tain                     tain                      tain

They will return          Doom!                    Doom!                     Doom!
Mankind will learn        ...                      ...                       ...
new kinds of fear         ...                      ...                       ...
when they are here        ...                      ...                       ...

Look to the sky           Fear
way up on high            the
There in the night        Old
stars are now right       Ones

Eons have passed          They                     Fear
now then at last          will                     the
prison walls break        re-                      Old
Old Ones awake            turn                     Ones

Madness will reign        Madness will reign       Madness will reign        Madness will reign
terror and pain           terror and pain          terror and pain           terror and pain
Woes without end          Woes without end         Woes without end          Woes without end
where they extend         where they extend        where they extend         where they extend

Ignorant fools            Ignorant fools           They                      Ignorant fools
Mankind now rules         Mankind now rules        will                      Mankind now rules
where they ruled then     where they ruled then    master this               where they ruled then
It's theirs again         It's theirs again        planet again              It's theirs again

Stars brightly burning    They will return         Stars brightly burning    They will return
boiling and churning      Mankind will learn       up in the gloom           Mankind will learn
bode a returning          new kinds of fear        bode a returning          new kinds of fear
season of doom            when they are here       season of doom            when they are here

Scary scary scary         They                     They will return          They
scary solstice            will return              Mankind will learn        will
Very very very            they                     new kinds of fear         re-
scary solstice            will return              when they are here        turn

Up from the sea           Man                      Man                       Man
from underground          has                      should                    has
down from the sky         much                     fear                      much
They're all around        to                       to                        to

Fear                      Fear                     Look to the sky           Fear
...                       ...                      way up on high            ...
...                       ...                      There in the night        ...
...                       ...                      stars now are right       ...

They will return...       They will return...      They will return...       They will return...

Care of The H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society.

Merry Christmas.

-The Gneech

So this morning my various social media feeds are buzzing with the story of the gal who dated a geek, discovered he was a geek and went “OMG Yuck!” and then proceeded to post a ranty blog about it, only to have the rest of the internet rightly tell her what a nasty thing she’d done.

Okay. I would submit that anybody who posts to any blog anywhere has no business blasting someone for being a geek, but that just serves to underscore the ridiculousness of her tirade. But that’s not the point.

See, almost immediately after I read that, another story came up about women bloggers being systematically targeted with death threats pretty much for being women with opinions about things. That leads me to look at some of the more vicious reactions to the gal’s rant with a bit of a wince.

Having recently been blasted for stating what I thought was a perfectly reasonable opinion and having the reaction be that Diana’s pack of hounds chased me down and tore me to shreds, I find myself in the curious position of being sympathetic to Alyssa Bereznak, not for her piece (which was awful) but for waking up one morning to discover that the internet hates you.

It’s not fun.

So please internet, I ask you, exercise some restraint. Yes, her blasting of Jon Finkel was not cool, but she’s a human being too. Don’t forget that.

-The Gneech

PS: Spreading the word about this idea would be appreciated. Thanks!

So I’m downtown at [agency redacted] going through the second step of getting an official Government Identity Card from the Department of Big Brother Is Watching You Homeland Security, when the building starts going rumba-rumba-rumba-rumba and we all start giving each other quizzical looks. One guy says, “It’s the train, it runs right behind the building.”

Looking at the windows buckling in the building across the street, I say, “That’s a hell of a train!”

Fingerprint and Registration Lady says, “That’s no train, that’s an earthquake!” just as it comes to a stop. She adds, “If it had kept on going, I would have evacuated.” (The “floor warden” vest and helmet hanging in her cubicle added weight to the statement.) With perfect sitcom timing, a security guy steps in the door and says, “We’re evacuating the building. Everybody out!”

Turns out, it’s the largest earthquake ever recorded in Virginia — which is not that impressive on the global scale of earthquakes, but given that our usual amount of earthquakes is nil plus heavy traffic, it’s quite discombobulating. (Imagine southern California reacting to three feet of snow — the sheer “what do we DO with this”-ness of it makes it comparable.) Fortunately, there doesn’t appear to have been a lot of damage and I’ve heard no reports of injuries so far — the biggest problem has been dealing with people’s reactions to it.

Basically, every building over six stories or so appears to have been evacuated and everybody was either sent home or stood around the sidewalks of D.C., chuckling nervously and making jokes about whether or not the earthquake damaged the debt ceiling, har har. All of the phone services were blocked to “non-emergency” use, making Twitter the only means of communication for a while, and even that was slow, but I was grateful to have anything at that stage.

The Metrorail was closed for about twenty minutes while they checked there was no damage to the tracks, and then the trains all operated at 15 MPH (presumably to minimize the chances of a major accident due to aftershocks). This made for a long and stressful ride home for me — I cannot seem to ride the Metro without there being an annoying 6-year-old boy next to me the whole time. You’ll be happy to know that 6-year-old boys still sing “Plop-plop, fizz-fizz, oh what a relief it is,” still think it’s hilarious, and still think that nobody else has ever heard it before and therefore want to hear it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

But I digress.

The point is, we’re all home and fine now, and very grateful for the concerned texts and e-mails. This was not my first earthquake, but it was the first strong and extended one, so I can at least add that to my list of life experiences.

Unfortunately, I still don’t have the gov’t ID, so it’s back to [agency redacted] again on Thursday to try again. Watch that be the day Klaatu comes back.

-The Gneech

This will be a long one, Websnark style. I apologize for the length, but I’ve got a lot to say here.

Imagine, if you can, what life was like for geeks and budding geeks in 1975-1976. Batman was all about camp. Star Wars was a pile of notes on George Lucas’s desk. The only really cool thing we had was Star Trek, and that was a canceled, not-terribly-popular show that was on life support by means of a Saturday morning cartoon. The only people who cared about it were NASA employees and the uncool kids.

But we made the best of it, and when you had enough kids together you could actually decently “play Star Trek” with a different actual person taking the role of Kirk, Spock, etc. Since I had the largest collection of Star Trek figures, including the Enterprise Bridge Playset, I got to call the shots on what we would do with it. On one particular afternoon, we actually had something like six of us together, including a girl whose name has long been lost out of the fuzzy recesses of my memory. She had dark hair, and I remember liking her because she was into all the same fantasy/SF stuff that I was, or at least didn’t go “Ew!” at it the way most of the girls did. But she lived in a different neighborhood, which when you’re six years old, might as well been another planet, so I rarely had the opportunity to play with her.

In any case, I was handing out figures for people to play with; I kept Spock for myself naturally, but pretty much let everybody else take whomever they pleased. But I left Uhura in the box, because she was such an nonentity. All she ever did was answer the phone and occasionally say, “Captain, I’m frightened.” What kind of a character is that?

This girl — I’m going to call her Melissa for purposes of the anecdote (and because I do remember knowing a girl named Melissa) — strenuously objected to this when I suggested she play Scotty. “I don’t want to play Scotty!”

“How can you not want to play Scotty? Scotty’s cool!” (May not have been my exact words … I was six.)

“But I’m a girl!”

This stymied me. It had never been an issue before: most of the time there were no girls around to play with anyway, and so if there were girl roles required, one of the boys would just take it. Playing a cross-gender role was something you just did if it was required to make the playing happen. (I myself became quite adept at the role of Kimba’s girlfriend, which seemed perfectly ordinary to me at the time and caused me much confusion when it bugged my best friend later. But that’s another story.) But for !Melissa it was apparently a big issue, and that left us stuck, because there was only the one girl figure: Lt. Uhura, who was only surpassed in boringness by Yoeman “Look At My Legs, Captain” Rand. If there had been a Lt. M’Ress figure, or even a Number One (Majel Barrett as human supercomputer, one of the coolest characters in Star Trek ever and therefore absolutely hated by the network), all would have been fine.

(It’s worth noting that Uhura did become cool later, particularly in Star Trek III, but that was decades away. Even her badass moment in “The Lorelei Signal” episode of the animated series only came because none of the Men Folk were around to be badass instead. And remember also, I was six, and didn’t realize that the reason Uhura was boring was because race and gender politics forbade her from being interesting at the time.)

This was my first real confrontation with the phenomenon of The Chick, and it’s something that really starts jumping out at you once you notice it. As someone in the blogosphere recently said (and I’m still looking for the exact quote, I’ll get back to you with it): many writers, especially of pop or genre fiction, default to male (and usually white male) for a character unless there’s a specific reason to do otherwise. Need a leader? White male. Smooth talker? White male. Gadgeteer? White male. Romantic Interest? Oops, guess we’ll make this one a female. Etc. Among other things, this leads to there being a character who is The Diversity Kid (“Chinese girl in a wheelchair, score!”), whose main role is to be The Diversity Kid, and who always rings false in the role.

Even being aware of this tendency isn’t enough to keep it from happening in your work: in NeverNever, both Mopsy and Jenny sometimes fall into the “The Chick” category, although I did try to make them interesting characters in their own right. (I was a little annoyed with myself at how often Jenny needed rescuing, but on the other hand just about everybody in the cast needed rescuing at least a few times.) Suburban Jungle was a bit better in this regard, largely because I started with a female protagonist and built the cast to be the people who were important to her life. Given how easy it is for me, a person who at least likes to think of himself as being proactive on this issue, to fall into it, it’s not hard to see why this is an ongoing phenomenon.

Now, fast-forward to today, where gender issues in geeky lit are in a state of high dudgeon. DC comics recently got reamed for its notable lack of female heroes and female creators (not to mention comics’ record generally for stuffing women into refrigerators). There is a strange backlash against girl geeks going on, especially ones who are what is traditionally thought of as “attractive” … and of course there’s a backlash against the backlash.

Into all this wanders My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, which as I mentioned before is a very girly show for girls that is girly, but is also just a straight-up awesome show, thus having a lot of crossover appeal. That there should be bronies, geeky male fans of a girly cartoon show, should be considered a Grand Thing, shouldn’t it?

Well apparently, not everyone thinks so. Consider this comic from Shortpacked!:

Now, I’m not a regular reader of Shortpacked! so I don’t know the context here. This comic came to my attention by way of a MLP:FIM blog in which the blogger didn’t wanted to be associated with the term “brony” because to him it apparently means “male MLP fan who is a jerk about it.” This, as far as I can tell, is nuts. (Which is also my reaction to fans of anthropomorphic animals generally who don’t want to be called “furries.”)

But there are a lot of things in this comic that stick in my craw. First and foremost, it’s clear that the guy is being a jerk; however, this is being held up more or less to be, “This guy is being male.” That in itself is a trend I’ve been sick of for years. Second, there is a noticeable disconnect between MLP:FIM and the merchandise it is ostensibly being made to sell, and that creates natural frustration on the part of fans who want to support something they like by buying the merchandise. (“I love Rainbow Dash, she’s got so much attitude! I’ll go buy a Rainbow Dash toy! Er, what’s this doe-eyed waif with Rainbow Dash’s name on it?”) I can’t speak for everybody, but speaking only for myself I don’t have a problem with the doe-eyed waif qua itself, my problem is that there isn’t anything with the Rainbow Dash I was looking for. [1]

But my real problem is in the line “Males have 6/7ths of the Justice League, 90 percent of the Avengers, 12/13ths of Transformers, and now you’ve taken My Little Pony.” Presumably this is intended as an indictment of the concept of The Chick, which is a concept that needs indicting. But it’s also built on a fundamentally bad premise: how exactly has My Little Pony been “taken” and from whom? Does one jackass mouthing off suddenly turn all of the ponies into colts instead of fillies? Is the woman in the comic now somehow prevented from liking My Little Pony because it’s not an all-girls club any more? The little rejoinder at the end, “Sorry, we noticed something we didn’t have,” also sticks in my craw because, of all the crazy things, it feeds negative stereotypes — i.e., the rapacious and plundering white male.

In short, the fundamental premise of this comic seems to be that boys shouldn’t be liking stuff for girls because girls have so little stuff of their own. But isn’t that just as ridiculous as saying that girls shouldn’t like superheroes because superheroes are meant for boys? Either that or “boys are pretty much all jackasses and anything they touch is ruined,” which is also a premise that I don’t much care for. (The irony that this comic was written by a guy is also not lost on me.)

Some of this is just the natural growing pains of any fandom, I imagine. The original brony rant about “I’m totally not a brony!” was an almost point-by-point copy of the same “I’m totally not a furry!” rant I’ve seen a hundred times. But really, it’s getting old. Anything with human beings involved is going to include assholes sooner or later, and people really need to get over that.

Oh, and for the record, I handed over the Uhura figure so !Melissa could play her, and a good time was had by all. Until we realized the delicate hands of the Uhura figure didn’t have an opposable thumb and so couldn’t hold a phaser. But that’s also a post for some other time.

-The Gneech

[1] Well, there is the one set of tiny little ponies from the show, noticeably missing Applejack and Fluttershy. What’s that about?

So I live in the ‘burbs of Washington D.C., and its a very diverse, cosmopolitan place. Around here it’s common to encounter people from all over the world, who speak widely-varying levels of English. But even given the linguistic barrier, occasionally there are things that just make you go, “Buh?”

This morning, Mrs. Gneech and I were taking our usual 10:45 walk around outside the office when a scrappy young teenage guy carrying a backpack, looking bronzed from much walking in the sun, approached us and said in a vaguely-slavic way, “I am zorry, but can you tell me, vere is Target?”

This is Tyson’s Corner: there is nothing as pedestrian as a Target within 10 miles. If he wanted expensive designer clothes or possibly a diamond-encrusted wristwatch, he’d be all set. So Mrs. Gneech and I blinked at him and went, “Uhh…” as we tried to think of the best option for this wayward pedestrian.

“Oh, no, vait,” he said, and checked his crumpled sheet of scribbled notes. “I mean, vere is Perfect Pita?”

Well, I can certainly see how one might confuse “Target” with “Perfect Pita.” (Wait, what?) Fortunately, Perfect Pita was right in the same Coke-bottle-green skyscraper as our office, so all we had to do was point at it and say, “In the lobby, all the way back, on the right.” He thanked us and went his way, and we went ours.

Naturally, he went up to the side door that read “Lasik Procedure,” and wondered where the pitas were. Fortunately, from there it was easy for him to spot the main lobby doors and go on in. By the time we were finished with our walk and coming into the building, we met him coming out again, after having spent a grand total of maybe 30 seconds inside.

Worried that he might have just stepped into the lobby, not seen the Perfect Pita, and stepped out again, Mrs. Gneech asked, “Did you find it?”

“Uh, yes, zank you,” said the kid, smiled in vague embarrassment, and took off, leaving us to wonder what the story was.

“I’m geocaching,” suggested Mrs. Gneech.

“It’s on my ‘bucket list,’” was my response.

Hell of it is, we’ll never know. But life is like that, around here.

-The Gneech

I have more to say about AnthroCon and I’ll say it later, but I do want to mention this before it gets lost in the shuffle.

On the way home yesterday evening, as we approached the Allegheny Mountain tunnel on Route 70, Lee and I were privileged to see a gorgeous, vibrant rainbow created by the storm that was in front of us and the sunset behind us. However, that was nothing compared to the vision we received on the other side of the tunnel: it was, as the man said, “a double rainbow, all the way,” and it was spectacular. It easily spanned half the horizon, stretching from one mountaintop to another, with route 70 shooting the gap. All seven colors of the spectrum were clearly visible, with the edges “fraying” into a fuzzy red-purple on either side.

Drastic action was required, so we took an emergency pull-off spot and got out to gawk. My little phone camera was not up to the task of capturing the whole thing, so I just took a pic of the most vibrant arc to send off to friends. Lee tried to get some better pics with his craptacular little point’n'shoot, but I’ll be very surprised if that was up to the task either.

Neither of us blissed out and starting ranting about it — that’s just not how we roll — but it was still a very cool experience.

-The Gneech

PS: At the time, we were pointed in the general direction of New York, which had just legalized gay marriage over the weekend. COINCIDENCE???