Time for popcorn and polls

[sabotabby]

[Poll #1400046]

Comments

[jenlight.livejournal.com]

My name is Wall Shitterly.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

We'll know we've won when he starts vanity-googling that pseudonym.

[sabotabby]

I will be really happy on the day that he shows up on my LJ and I can ban him.

[jenlight.livejournal.com]

3... 2...

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

SPOCK, NO. I AM THE REAL WALL SHITTERLY. DON'T BELIEVE HIM!

[terry-terrible.livejournal.com]

So, why do you hate whitey?

[sabotabby]

Adult contemporary music. Genocide. Mayonnaise.

[lienne.livejournal.com]

I cannot answer this poll because I have no definition of "best".

[sabotabby]

I'm going with "most hilarious/engrossing/tragic."

[lady-ganesh.livejournal.com]

I picked Mammothfail because I like the name.

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

_I_ am W*ll Sh*tt*rly! You all are clearly a lot of class-deluded fools. I went to CHOATE and I was POOR. //deletes LJ and brings it back twenty times

[sabotabby]

I'm envisioning that scene in Spartacus.

"I am W*ll Sh*tt*rly!"

"I am W*ll Sh*tt*rly!"

I need brain bleach now.

[jenlight.livejournal.com]

LIES

[jamie-miller.livejournal.com]

What is MammothFail? I am familiar with RaceFail but not its sequel.

[sabotabby]

Behold! MammothFail.

[cacahuate.livejournal.com]

My real answer, from my cursory knowledge of the fails, is "I can't decide."

[troubleinchina.livejournal.com]

I think W.S. should count as a RaceFail all on his own. My gosh, did you see his post on Metafilter? I want to eat him.

[ironed_orchid]

MammothFail has the best name, but the previous round had more Well Shatterly.

[chainsaw-hime.livejournal.com]

Would the real Wall Shitterly please stand up?

[faithhopetricks.livejournal.com]

....Please stand up, please stand up, please stand up.... //is earwormed //cries

Young Geoffrey dons helmet and much body-padding in preparation for pummeling

[ed-rex.livejournal.com]

I voted for "Why does Sabotabby hate white people?" based largely on your recent Tamil protests-related entries. (In a nutshell, I've heard quite a few voices calling in to Metro Morning who were almost certainly not white bitching about being inconvenienced & who cares about the Tamils anyway, &ct &ct; point being, it ain't just white folks who consider their own commuting convenience far more important than genocide half-way around the world. But this is (at best) only tangentially related to MammothFail. And so, onwards.)

I'd never before heard of Patricia Wrede and so, obviously, I can't comment on the book. So I'll just say that, like most fantasies nowadays (Young Geoffrey must be getting older, the curmudgeon!), it sounds pretty silly and I'm unlikely to ever read it.

But, honest to Christ, I don't see what all the fuss is about.

Well, I do, but the fuss sounds as ludicrous as the synopsis in the review of the book itself.

This kind of thing can, and has been, done well. See Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt, which is a what-if novel which opens with a Mongolian horseman travelling into Europe as a scout for Genghis Khan, only to discover that the Plague was a little more virulent than the one we know from history; rather than 25% of Europeans dying of it, considerably more than 99% of them do.

And Years of Rice and Salt goes on to explore what might have happened over the next thousand or so years had there been no European explosion. It's a fascinating book, and possibly Robinson's best.

Anyway, my point is, I find the number of books in which Native Americans have not been "disappeared" and yet which include no Native characters a good deal more troubling than one silly (sounding) novel which posits Mammoths and Short Faced Bears and Magic(!) but no Indians.

Love,

Geoff Shitterly (can I still come to your birthday party — if I'm awake for it?)

Re: Young Geoffrey dons helmet and much body-padding in preparation for pummeling

[lzz.livejournal.com]

Anyway, my point is, I find the number of books in which Native Americans have not been "disappeared" and yet which include no Native characters a good deal more troubling than one silly (sounding) novel which posits Mammoths and Short Faced Bears and Magic(!) but no Indians.

I read a children's book recently (Ringmaster by Julia Golding), which despite being set in Kenya contains no significant black characters at all. The only black characters are those who occasionally briefly appear for a scene or two as either a) a random unnamed villain or b) a person who is kind and helpful but whose character is not developed at all - they primarily exist to help the white upper-class heroine out of a tight spot for no reward before sinking back into the background again. It is also possible that they exist due to a feeling on the part of the author/publisher that they ought to put in some kind, helpful black people.

Re: Young Geoffrey dons helmet and much body-padding in preparation for pummeling

[caprinus.livejournal.com]

Anyway, my point is, I find the number of books in which Native Americans have not been "disappeared" and yet which include no Native characters a good deal more troubling than one silly (sounding) novel which posits Mammoths and Short Faced Bears and Magic(!) but no Indians.

If I wasn't so lazy, I would have written this entry before reading your comment and thus claim originality! *sob*

But seriously, alternative histories erasing and altering entire peoples is not a contribution to genocide. I have an interest in ancient Phoenicians and Philistines, for example, and have toyed with the thought of an alternative universe in which the Jews never invade Canaan (and eventually Rome loses the Punic wars). I would have to somehow erase the Jews from history -- oh well. They all drown crossing the Red Sea, the end. It's the real histories erasing and altering entire peoples that's a problem.

The press of outraged people who have never read and never intend to read the book flocking to the TOR blog sabs pointed us to in the previous post was mostly interesting and made good points about controversies surrounding NA megafauna extinction scenarios, and whether the prohibition on the Bering Strait landbridge crossing could really have kept prehistoric humans out (Polynesia and Bering Strait open water crossing being the suggested alternatives), but none that showed how positing a (pre)history in which no humans made it to North America was a racist moral failing. NarrativeFail, perhaps, but again, I haven't read the book either.

Re: Young Geoffrey dons helmet and much body-padding in preparation for pummeling

[sabotabby]

This kind of thing can, and has been, done well. See Kim Stanley Robinson's Years of Rice and Salt, which is a what-if novel which opens with a Mongolian horseman travelling into Europe as a scout for Genghis Khan, only to discover that the Plague was a little more virulent than the one we know from history; rather than 25% of Europeans dying of it, considerably more than 99% of them do.

I already babbled about the distinction between this and other alternate history novels here. Though I still have to read Years of Rice and Salt.

(And I am a big fan of alternate histories. I am even writing one/several.)

See you tonight. You'd better be awake for it. I need to balance out the colleagues:friends ratio a bit.

[cimness.livejournal.com]

I was really fond of a much smaller fail a couple of years ago - what were we calling it - BaristaGate, perhaps? The one where COCs in SGA being menial workers and/or pets isn't racist but pointing it out was Racist against Baristas.