It’s frustrating when you see words used wrong. A number of years ago, I saw an article about a school in rural South Carolina that showed a photo with a black teacher and a dozen black children. The article talked about the challenges of teaching such a “diverse” group of children. One could hardly imagine a less diverse group of students: they were all the same in terms of age, race, and economic background. The author had evidently come to believe that “diverse” was a euphemism for “disadvantaged.” But, of course, that’s not what “diverse” means at all.

It’s even more frustrating when you see intelligent people intentionally misusing words for rhetorical effect to mislead people and demonize marginalized populations, such as is happening now with diversity, equity, and inclusion or DEI.

The Trump administration has made eliminating “DEI” a priority. Research has disclosed a list of banned words they have been trying to remove from federal projects, publications, and websites. There have been many examples of this ham-handed approach being overbroad and destructive, sweeping in unrelated topics like the Enola Gay (the WWII bomber that dropped the first atomic bomb) or “privilege escalation” (an infosecurity term related to unauthorized administrative access), and on and on.

The principle of diversity, equity, and inclusion is to ensure that everyone has a fair opportunity to participate. We want diverse perspectives. We want everyone to succeed. We don’t want some people privileged over others for arbitrary reasons. The only people who could possibly oppose this principle are people who want unfair greater opportunities than others. Or who want to exclude people systematically for some arbitrary reason, like irrational hatred.

It should be self-evident that diverse perspectives are required for wisdom. If you’re missing perspectives then your understanding is going to be incomplete. Two eyes are better than one. And using all of your senses gives you a better understanding than not. We need perspectives that are different than our own to complement our understanding.

It benefits all of us to have everyone rise to their fullest potential. The more capable, productive members we have in society, the more our society prospers. Every person who is unable to succeed is a loss to all of us. And there’s no reason that we can’t let everyone develop their full potential. Life need not be a zero-sum game where only some people can succeed.

When arbitrary, irrelevant reasons (age, gender identity, race, religion, etc.) are used to exclude people, we lose those perspectives and cause those people to fail to realize their full potential. This injures all of us. This is what DEI aims to ensure: that everyone gets fair consideration.

Most people who knowingly oppose DEI are racists, transphobes, and homophobes, who want to exclude people out of hatred. Or who fear the loss of their privileged position in society over marginalized groups. It is abhorrent that these people have succeeded in electing leadership to act on their hatred to try to reassert their privileged position in society by discriminating against others.

What is more horrifying, however, is that most of the people who currently oppose DEI have been whipped up, like a mob, to keep the population divided, fighting among each other, and distracted. Many of them, in the absence of disinformation and propaganda, would probably understand that DEI benefits everyone.

Worst, however, is that the people who are fomenting the mob are intentionally crafting language to mislead people into opposing their own interests. They, themselves, are mostly indifferent to DEI and are only disingenuously exploiting the division that exists for their own ends: to consolidate power and prevent people, who should be natural allies, from uniting to oppose their nefarious goals.

It is said that the long arc of history bends toward justice. But it’s hard to watch when you see evil people trying to push it back toward injustice, intolerance, and hatred.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the Trump administration is going to try to destroy higher education. Or, rather, transform it in the model of what Christopher Rufo did to the New College in Florida. By “destroy,” I mean that they will try to establish rigid ideological guidelines and force out any faculty that hold alternative views. They will try to replace “education” with “indoctrination.” In a well publicized incident, the new administration shut down the Gender and Diversity Center and threw out all of their books, describing it as “taking out the garbage.”

It’s not clear what the universities themselves can do. Some will be protected by the states they’re in. But much of what public research universities do is supported by federal funding. As that funding is withdrawn, universities will find it difficult to maintain their research programs. Or, indeed, to even pay for the capital investments they made prospectively to support research programs. In anticipation of these coming changes, universities are already withdrawing acceptances of graduate students, since the funding to support them is uncertain.

These changes will be catastrophic for science in the United States. We’re going to lose a whole generation of scientists and cripple the research programs that have kept the United States competitive globally.

It will be catastrophic, also, for the scientists doing this work. If your research lab experiences a gap in funding, you very quickly lose your ability to stay current and maintain competitiveness for future grants. Research is expensive. Without funding, you lose your trained staff and the resources you need to stay active: your whole enterprise loses momentum. And once you fall behind, it’s difficult to ever catch up.

What faculty mostly don’t have to worry about is their own salary. So I have a suggestion for my colleagues: Every minute that you are unable to conduct your research, you should devote to public advocacy in support of higher education. Join your union. Lobby your legislators. Write letters and articles. If thousands of faculty begin to devote themselves to writing op eds, publishing books, and holding public lectures about the importance of science and why the government’s grievous errors have endangered us all, it might make them wish they’d never unleashed these forces.

It’s pretty clear that nobody knows exactly what social media is supposed to be like. People use it for a lot of different things. I like think of it as a cocktail party. People drop in, listen to what other people are saying, say some things themselves, and maybe comment on what other people are saying.

I particularly like Mastodon because I feel like I get a higher-quality of engagement here. The things people post are frequently interesting. People read the things I post and offer substantive comments. And I feel like they frequently appreciate the value-add that my comments offer.

Nobody has to come to the cocktail party. And you don’t have to be in the main room with everyone else. If you’d rather hold forth in some private room, you can do that.

What always puzzles me are the people who get exercised that other people are “doing it wrong.” If you’re saying stuff in public, you shouldn’t be surprised if people comment on it. If you didn’t want people to comment on it, you’d hold your conversations someplace in private.

Similarly, if you don’t like the things that someone else says, you can simply mute or block people.

Some people seem to really like the drama of personal confrontation. Some people are all about the snark and the SNAP. Recently, I saw someone reply to a picture someone had posted with a link to an article about the subject of the picture. The original poster snapped at them for “mansplaining”. Whoa. I had thought their post was fine. It was informative and added useful information. But, hey, if drama is someone’s thing, that’s OK too, I guess. It’s easy to mute and block.

My point is that it’s not really clear that you can do social media wrong exactly. Unless you’re a Nazi. But then it’s not really about the social media anymore, is it?

Small Publishing in Big Universe at Watch City

Small Publishing in a Big Universe (SPBU) is sponsoring a table at the Watch City Steampunk Festival again this year on May 10 in Waltham, Massachusetts. If you’re an author who would like to attend you can fill out this form to join us and sell your books. You can already see who is signed up this year.

Watch City is an amazing spectacle! There are hundreds of people who attend wearing steampunky costumes with dozens of vendors selling art, crafts, and food. Plus music, contests, and performances. It’s a fun-filled day with lots of excitement and cheer.

I ran the table for SPBU last year and we sold a fair number of books. I’m looking forward to going back again this year! Maybe this year, I’ll be organized enough that the colors of the price tags will actually mean something. It could happen!

I watch the Amazon rank of my books to get a measure of what’s going on. Since I’m not the publisher of my books, I don’t have access to the underlying raw data from all of the different places where my books are sold. But watching the Amazon rank gives me some indication of what’s going on.

The reasons why the rank changes are pretty inscrutable. When people buy copies via Amazon you see a big bump. When nobody’s buying, it declines. But it sometimes goes up and down small amounts for other undetermined reasons: Maybe people searching for it? Or making searches in which it appears? Who knows?

When Better Angels: Tour de Force came out, we marked the original Better Angels short story free everywhere. It’s the first story in Tour de Force and you can see it for free as part of the digital preview anyway. But it turns out that you can’t mark Kindle books free. Amazon won’t let you. If Amazon sees you’re giving a book away elsewhere, however, it will sometimes mark the Kindle book for free too. (This happened with The Third Time’s the Charm, which is still free everywhere, including at Amazon.)

When a book is free, its rank seemingly goes way, way up. That’s not too surprising, I suppose. When it was marked free, it went from ~3M to about ~50K and then would bounce around there. It would sometimes spike up to 1500 or so and then drift back down. I noticed it spiked up the other day and then, when I checked again, it had dropped down to 3.5M. “Huh?” I thought. So I went to look at the product page and noticed that it wasn’t free anymore.

It’s still free elsewhere. I checked at Smashwords and Kobo anyway. Weird. It’s impossible to know why Amazon does anything they do — other than that one can reliably predict they’re shoving their blood funnel into anything that smells like money.

I attended Boskone before I started publishing science fiction and I was impressed by the number of authors I recognized. I’ve attended the last two years and it still hasn’t lost that magic. And being able to rub shoulders now as an author myself is a lot of fun. I was particularly looking forward to setting up a fan table for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) and meeting SFWA members that I expected would drop by.

I like to arrive the night before so I can get a good night’s sleep and have plenty of time to find everything to get ready beforehand. But this year, there was a storm the day before and some work events conflicted with getting an early start. So we decided to wait and just drive over on the morning of the convention.

When we arrived, I visited the area where registration would be. There was one person there and I was gratified that they recognized my name. We confirmed when registration would open and where the fan tables were.

After we checked in, we went back to the car and, on the way, found that the galleria was already open. Once we’d put our stuff in the room, I went back and set up the SFWA Fan Table. I had received the necessary supplies just two days before: A banner, tablerunners, an ARCH D sized posterboard, two kinds of flyers, and rack cards.

It took less than an hour to get setup. I commented that it was WAY less work than setting up a dealer table. When I set up the tables for Water Dragon Publishing and Small Publishing in a Big Universe at Readercon, we had more than 70 titles to unbox, organize, and set up on book stands. By comparison, this was a snap.

Then I just hung out at the table.

I had some other events scheduled. I moderated a panel, served on three panels, and had a reading. They were all excellent. Well, all except the reading: Nobody came to my reading. I got my books out with cards and stickers and ribbons and ‘zines. But nobody came. I sat there for a half hour, then packed everything up and went on with the con. That’s how it is when you’re a nobody.

My younger son came with me and helped cover the fan table when I couldn’t be there. He made a point of telling people that he was not a SFWA member, but was eligible to be an associate member. He said that people told him nice things about me, which made me feel good.

I got to meet a lot of SFWA folks. Some current board members, former board members, and former officers stopped by. And a goodly number of members. I also got to explain SFWA to a bunch of new people. I don’t know how many new members we might get. But, personally, just getting to meet a bunch of people, was a big win for me.

We had been watching the weather and had considered staying another night in the event it looked bad. Originally, it looked like it might be a big snow event. But then it looked like it might just be rain. Then it looked like it might be icy. So we packed up a little early to drive during the warmest part of the afternoon. In the end, it was just rainy on the MassPike, but there had been a lot of snow at our house. We had no problem getting home, but I was a bit daunted to pull the car into the 8 inches of snow on the driveway. But I was able to park. Getting the car out may be another matter.

Today, my university sent me a link to a mandatory cybersecurity training. In the HTML-formatted email, they included a link that looks like this:

https://university.matrixlnselu.com/training/home

But the actual link that would be opened goes to something like:

https://num9.safeclicks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fclick.marcon.university.edu%2F%3Fqs
%3D79af0e80a4fc65b28bc6d7truckf2e0620df074d3c5769b3901
732d80246a6a905559ef9d772af96560ba50bbfe6380c2309c565d
7e2c62631&data=05%7C02%7Csdbrewer%40university.edu%7Cb
702860502824bdd172f08dd421140a2%7C7bd08b0b13374dc194bb
d0b2e57a497f%7C0%7C0%7C638739364061829157%7CUngown%7CT
WFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXBsex1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCI
sIlAiOiJXaW4zpenisFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7
C%7C%7C&sdata=Km50bFeo%2FrVW4AtWPtduUM2FZQhKdYWbcJQZlS
7YNjE%3D&reserved=0

(note: these have been munged so they hopefully won’t work)

There are actually two redirections in the link above. First, the mail-system rewrites every URL you receive in email and replaces it with a database look up at outlook.com so that if they decide a URL is malicious (i.e. links to something they don’t like) they can make it so the link doesn’t work. The second redirect is done by the system that generates the original email: they want to keep track of who clicked on the link so they can generate metrics about who is reading their emails.

I replied to the email to say “This seems like a terrible security practice. URLs should go where they say they do. And if they don’t, employees should be trained to not click on them. Duh.”

I replied back to the sender (which opened a “ticket” with IT) and I copied the Chief Information Officer of the university, whom I’ve known for many, many years. He replied first, “I hear you” he said. But he made it clear this is just what we’re doing now.

I pointed out that I’ve always tried to teach people to never click on links like that which leak information information about your browsing activity. I spent most of my career pushing back against this kind of enshittification. But to little avail seemingly.

We went on to exchange a couple more emails about feeling like grumpy old men complaining about the young whippersnappers who can’t read packet captures or “parse a coredump to save themselves.”

University IT replied later to close the ticket and say, “Thanks for the feedback. We will take it into consideration for future training notifications.” Heh. Right.

I’ve gotten my final schedule for Boskone, Feb 14-16! I’m moderating one panel, serving on three others, and offering a reading on Saturday afternoon. 

 Start Time              Title
Fri  2:30 PM       Biology in SF/F                                   
Sat 10:00 AM       SF and Totalitarianism                            
Sat 11:30 AM       Genetic Engineering (mod)                              
Sat  5:30 PM       Reading: Steven D. Brewer                         
Sun 10:00 AM       Fantasy Beyond Swords and Sorcery

There are a lot of great people on the panels with me. It should be a lot of fun!

We didn’t get a table in the dealer room this year and so, since I’ll otherwise be at liberty, I’ve decided to organize a fan table for SFWA. It will be in the Galleria (along with the dealer room) so stop by to say hi!

When I was in grad school, circa 1994, I started writing haiku in Esperanto and exchanged them with my brother Phil. It was a way to practice Esperanto and have “a moment of zen” each day during a time when I was very busy.

At first, most of my haiku were “joke haiku”. I eventually learned that there is a name for joke haiku: senryu. But some of the haiku I wrote, even in those early days, were actually not bad. And doing something creative, however small, was meaningful to me.

A few years later, after I had secured a faculty appointment and moved to the Pioneer Valley, the Haiku Society of America met in Northampton. I attended out of curiosity, and was intrigued when my haiku were taken seriously. I realized that I didn’t have to treat writing haiku as a joke. And that there was a long history of haiku, going back hundreds of years. And a larger world of practice that included tanka, renga, haibun, and more.

Ten years later, I decided to self-publish a book of haiku in Esperanto with English translation: Poŝtmarkoj el Esperantujo. I decided to include artwork along with the haiku and developed a theme of imaginary postage stamps from Esperantujo — Esperanto Land, a fabled country that springs into existence around people when they speak together in Esperanto. I used photographs I’d taken, combined them with a frame that looked like perforations, and added a monetary symbol that used the unicode glyph for spesmiloj, a proposed universal currency.

It was my first attempt to lay out a book. It was a lot of work and it didn’t turn out quite perfectly. But it was pretty good. It was incredibly gratifying to receive the proof in the mail and actually hold it in my hands.

Due to the full color illustrations, it was pretty expensive. But I had a great time showing it to people and giving copies to family and friends. Since it was so expensive, I set the price to be effectively at cost. As costs increased, Amazon became unwilling to sell it (since they don’t make enough profit). So I eventually decided to make it available via Google Books for free. I can still order author’s copies, however, so if anyone really wants printed and signed copy on paper, let me know.

I published three more books of haiku. Premitaj Floroj (Pressed Flowers) used images from the UMass Herbarium. My best work, I think, was senokulvitre (without eyeglasses) for which I created a series of black-and-white illustrations with a narrow range of focus. I still use these images frequently to illustrate blog posts. In 2016, I published the last one, Ideoj Ĝermas (Ideas Germinate) that used creative-commons licensed imagery of seeds from a French museum. These are all still available for purchase.

I’ve written hundreds of haiku in the intervening ten years, but I haven’t published another book. I came up with a great idea for one. But collecting the imagery would be a lot of work and so I haven’t done it. I’m not sure the world needs another book of haiku in Esperanto. I’m not sure it ever did, honestly. It certainly didn’t appreciate them. But I had fun making them and that’s what really counts in the end.

I’ve only been attending Arisia for a few years and every year I’ve attended, it’s been at the Westin Seaport in Boston. But this year, they switched to the Hyatt Regency in Cambridge. Evidently, it had been here in the past.

It’s a lot smaller. It filled up so quickly that I wasn’t able to get lodging. And my publisher wasn’t able to get a spot in the dealer room.

I was able to get on the program. I was scheduled for six panels and a reading. Unfortunately, since I wasn’t able to get lodging, I decided to drive over only for a single day. So I declined the two panels and the reading on Saturday and planned to drive over just for Sunday.

A couple of days before, the forecast changed to predict a serious winter storm for Sunday night. Great, I thought. But I have a four-wheel drive car, so I decided to just go for it.

They had warned the parking might not be available, so I got up at 4:30am and drove into Boston, arriving around 7am. As it turned out, parking wasn’t a problem and I had plenty of time to walk around and find everything before registration opened at 9am. Not that it took long to find things, because the venue was quite small.

I hung out in the cafe for a while and then ran into a writer friend who was setting up to volunteer in registration. We chatted amiably and then, once registration opened, I was able to get my badge, go to Program Nexus to get my presenter packet, get the QR code to get the parking discount, and get set up for my first panel.

It felt crowded and cramped having to squeeze through the hallway that was jammed with people. Arisia requires masks, but I found being in crowds to be nearly panic-inducing even before COVID.

My first panel was The Good, the Bad and the Cringe: Science in Social Media about how misinformation and disinformation has made social media into disaster even worse than journalism was before. All of the participants brought useful information. I was able to offer some unique perspectives about how people use social media, not just for information, but for “lulz” where engagement is more important than veracity. At the same time, I asked the audience to consider which was more important when they were a teenager trying to learn about sex: the sex-ed class or the locker-room? Both perspectives are incomplete: the sex-ex class generally offers only a curated and white-washed view of the truth while the locker room is more authentic, but full of misinformation and distortions. But both perspectives add value.

I had a short break before my next panel Athleticism in Fantasy and Science Fiction. I had wanted to be on the panel because physical fitness and training are essential elements in both Revin’s Heart and A Familiar Problem. I was able to plug my books and contribute several good bits that seemed appreciated by the audience and other participants.

I had a long break until my next presentation. It was so crowded in the hotel, I finally just went out to my car in the freezing parking garage, covered up with my coat, and snoozled for an hour until the cold finally drove me back in.

My favorite session was probably Writing With The Rainbow. This was the only one that was really about authorship. And had all the queer vibes I love. I was able to talk about my books and short stories I’ve written and the goals I’ve been trying to accomplish. I was glad to meet all of other participants and we had a great conversation about the topics.

Immediately after was my last panel, Makerspaces – For When You Can’t Own All The Tools, where I was the moderator. One of the participants had dropped out, so there were only four of on the panel and, so I promoted myself to be a participant as well as moderator. It was a nicely diverse group with another academic makerspace user, someone from a huge independent makerspace, and someone who runs a small makerspace out of their home. I was pleased with how well the questions I’d crafted elicited good conversation and information. I told a couple of stories that resonated with the participants and audience, about making a shimenawa and a story I’d heard about AS220.

As soon as the last panel wrapped up, I hurried out to my car and started driving home. The winter storm was moving in, and I had to drive straight through it to get home. The road signs all said, “Winter Storm Warning! Plan ahead!” Gee, thanks.

Visibility was low in a few spots and the MassPike was snow-covered, so it was sometimes difficult to see lane markings. I averaged about 40mph and took a longer route which avoided the back roads. It increased the travel time by only about 1/3, so was well worth it. It was nice to get home and go to sleep before midnight in my own bed after a very long day.

Now today, I’m back to work, waiting to see if I caught COVID, and dreading the change in administration. But, for a cold snowy day, I’ve made a big pot of clam chowder and am staying in where it’s warm.

I think Arisia is going to be in the same venue again next year, so I’ll plan to make my reservations earlier and recommend my publisher make the request for space in the dealer room as early as possible.