crushing creativity

I am a little tired...nay, a lot tired...of the manufactured angst over the whole Tomb Raider reboot. In a nutshell: an interview at Kotaku revealed how the audience would "want to protect" the new Lara, because men the players cannot possibly want to BE a woman action hero, and! as a bonus! the game was throwing in an attempted gang rape as backstory to humanize young Lara.

Chuck Wendig does a very nice take-and-breakdown of the whole business so I don't have to. Let me only say that if you require a gang rape and trauma to make your characters seem human to you, I think you should seek therapy.

I got involved in a protracted angst-fest on Facebook with a young man who insisted that nothing should ever be off limits to artists, nothing, not even RAPE as a backstory! Sob! And while I agree, in principle, with that idea--I do think that a male-written game exploiting rape as backstory for a female hero, when we never ever ever have male heroes raped as part of their backstory, suggests that rape's awesomeness as a storyline is limited to women. There's an appalling prevalence of rape in games (both video and tabletop) and geekdom already.  An examination of why that is might possibly reveal some attitudes that should be changed if we really want women to play--

But it's all about the aaaaaaart, said the Voice of Male Privilege. We should not censor artists by making topics taboo. It's not that there's sexism, it's just that no one ever writes rape scenarios for men.

But why might that be---? Oh, never mind. I am infinitely patient with students. I am not at all patient with idiots. I live with one deaf cat, so I know the futility of shouting at those who will not hear.

But here's the thing: no one said anything about censorship. No one said "you cannot write this thing, not ever!" It's not censorship if part of your target audience objects to what you're doing and throws a fit or writes mean blog posts or whatever. Offending people in the name of "Art" seems to be the new aesthetic, but the artists are not allowed to be offended in return. Art does not exempt you from criticism. Criticism is not censorship. But it is also not  political correctness if, because of protests or public opinion or audience outrage, a storyline or topic is declared off limits. That is the market at work, mes amis. If the audience does not want it, the producers will not produce it. Sometimes bad press is just bad.

But let's come back to Tomb Raider. 

Lemme quote from this article:

Why don't people project themselves onto Lara? Because "people" means males. Nobody (well, almost nobody) wants to be Lara Croft, not even women, because Lara is very much the subject of Male Gaze in her games, and who wants to open themselves up to that sort of scrutiny? Getting a bit deeper, while many women do want to be attractive to males, which is part of why women's magazines often take a Male Gaze perspective as well, they don't want to be only that. They don't want to be stared at all the time, by everyone. Lara is at no point "just a person."

Yep. And that's part of the problem. Which is why it's okay to subject her to sexual violence as part of an emotional hook for the (male) audience, and why no male heroes get the same treatment.

Look. Being asked to listen and consider the privilege underlying your artistic choices is not censorship. And it's not PC. It's a check on privilege, yes, and it might make things more difficult, since you might have to think about a) what you are doing and b) how it might affect an audience. But that's rhetoric. That's marketing. That's making a product for consumption. If you don't care how women feel, carry on! But if you do, then shut the fuck up and listen. Because what we're hearing right now, from you, is "why won't the bitches play the games we make for them?" 

the ghosts and the devil box

So the old oven in the old apartment had ghosts in it. Little cold fingers that made baking kinda tricky, because those cold fingers moved. I estimate its age and mine as about the same, which is to say--a young, strong, vibrant person, and an raddled ancient machine haunted by the spirits of ruined baking projects.

And now, we have the Devil Box. The new oven has a portal straight to Hell in it. Like, Sunnydale's got nothing on this hellmouth. I reckoned it ran hot the first time I used it, but I saved that batch of pulla. Then it did fine with scones. And then it tried to char the lemon drops, and then I got a thermometer to tell me exactly how inhospitable and inaccurate this damned thing was.

Fifty degrees, more or less. More, at the higher ends, because once it's hot, it keeps heating. Yesterday it shot from 400 to 475 (when it's set on 375) in the space of 12 minutes. This morning, we had stable muffin-baking at a set temp of 350 and a target, actual in-oven temp of 400.

This is a challenge for someone who bakes quite a bit, and who does not care at all if the microwave works or not (it does, for the record: I melted butter in it last week). I suspect Former Tenant never cracked the oven in his tenure here (I say "he" because of the little stash of condoms forgotten in the top corner of the closet, where no woman other than Brienne  could reach without a ladder, which was how I found them. With the ladder, not Brienne).


At some point, I may have to see if maintenance here extends to calibrating the oven. But since at the moment we have one cat over the lease limit, I am avoiding that call. No, it's up to me and the thermometer to do battle with the Devil and keep those muffins, cookies, scones, and whatever else unburnt and edible.

cinders and smoke

The pines were roaring on the heights.

The winds were moaning in the night.

The fire was red.

It flaming spread.

The trees like torches blazed with light.

I used to have this image on a pink (!) t-shirt when I was... five. Or six.

So a week ago Saturday, my parents called. This is unusual because they don't call me on Saturdays. We have an orderly, habitual relationship. I call them, and it's usually on Sundays. My father is the exception; he called twice the previous week to check on the colors for the matte for Nous's PhD diploma.

The point is, when one has, well, not elderly parents, but at least not young ones, one worries when they deviate from pattern...even if your first impulse is to ignore the phone because it's Date Night and you hate-hate-hate cell phones in restaurants (and you know your mother would agree with your decision).

The moment I got outside, I checked the voicemail.

Don't panic, Dad said (which is a guarantee that I should be freaking out, and that Mom probably is). But there's a fire just a little ways west of here, in Waldo Canyon, and we're under voluntary evacuation orders. We're not leaving, but we're packing. Just so you know.

This was a WTF moment. My parents do not live in the Colorado foothills. They live in a subdivision miles and miles from actual forests. There's a little wild-ish park across the street, laced with trails and paths, in which one sees coyotes and foxes and deer and bobcats, with rumors of bigger predators. But it's very much city. If you know my mother, you will understand why the very idea of living in the boonies is laughable.

Mom claimed to be unworried. Dad, too. And then the fire just...kept...growing. Manitou Springs was evacuated (and allowed to come home). Dry devil winds pushed the flames along the canyons, and over the fire lines. I watched the news on Facebook. I watched the live streams from C-Springs TV online. I knew, maybe 5 minutes before my parents called, that their section of Rockrimmon had been evacuated.

That was Tuesday.

It's a little creepy, and a lot awful, to see photographs of a place you know pretty well on international news, and to recognize landmarks, and to know just how close that glowing line is to your parents' house. To realize just how far into the actual city--a big city!--the fire had gotten. My best friend called daily to check on my parents. My friends on Facebook kept a constant stream of updates. And my parents and I talked daily, too--Mom convinced of the worst, Dad taking the wait-and-see position.

I came back from yoga on Wednesday and saw a big red ice-rune on the altar. Nous, it seemed, was getting into the fire-fighting business.

Mountain Shadows, a mere 350 yards as-the-crow-flies from my parents' house, burned. The little park across the street remained unburnt, but the subdivision on the other side--that I had seen being built, that I had looked at, as I hiked the park with my parents' dog--that burned flat.

And then the weather shifted, the winds died a little, the clouds came back, and the firefighters started winning.

By Saturday, my parents were back home. A little spoiled food, a little smoke-smell, that was all. Mom imagines that there's damage from falling cinders on the roof, but that inspection has not happened yet. Dad reported three sprinkler heads in need of repair. Life returned to normal, just like that.

Except for the ash-black hills behind them, where the mountains used to be.