Eugene Fischer

Author: Eugene Fischer

Testing Tumblr Sync

This is a test of using ifttt.com to mirror the content from this blog to eugenefischer.tumblr.com. I’d prefer to mirror directly using some kind of plugin, but that doesn’t seem to currently be possible. Although it looks like it would be a built-in feature if this were a WordPress.com hosted blog, which is slightly galling. Also galling is that before the Tumblr redesign two weeks ago, I could have done it as an RSS import from the Tumblr account. And tools for going from Tumblr to WordPress are well supported–probably a sign of the zeitgeist, that. But I don’t actually want to dive fully into tumblr and make that my platform, I’m happy with my little website. So we’ll see if this works. It should be enough text for a meaningful test, anyway.

EDIT: It looks like the test was a success! It remains to be seen if the automatic trigger works; I triggered the sync manually this time. It’s supposed to check automatically every 15 minutes. I’m also not sure if edits to posts will sync. I’ll test that now.

EDIT 2: Nope. Only new posts sync over this way, not edits to existing posts. Oh well, it’s better than nothing. And the up-to-15 minute delay should take care of most of it anyway. When I edit posts it’s usually to fix spelling errors and such shortly after posting. But the Tumblr mirror may not be a perfectly accurate reproduction of this blog. Good enough for now, though. This concludes tonight’s test. Please resume your lives.

EDIT 3: One blog update later, can confirm that automatic sync works.

Thoughts on TO THE WONDER

As we were leaving the theater I said to my two friends, “That was my first Malick. Are they all that shitty?” And both my friends and an elderly couple leaving the theater ahead of us stopped to assure me that no, To The Wonder was an unusually shitty entry in his ouvre. But it’s one I found so lacking, I may never be motivated to give him another shot.

In my eyes, Terrence Malick’s To The Wonder was a cloying masculine power fantasy that thought itself a tender rumination on love and loss. Ben Affleck’s character, the male lead, is a fully abstract cypher who is nonetheless subject to the passionate devotions of Olga Kurylenko’s and Rachel McAdams’s characters, both of whom are treated leeringly by the camera in their every scene. Neither woman behaves in a remotely human fashion, as they are equally prone to infantile behaviors like playing coquettish games of peek-a-boo and randomly spinning in place to communicate contentment. They treat Ben Affleck’s affections as the world’s only desirable thing, and when he eventually spurns each one for the other, they both treat the event not as a betrayal, but as a tragic loss that they’ve somehow brought on themselves. After Kurylenko finally convinces Affleck to marry her (by, it is somewhat implied, giving up custody of her daughter) they grow increasingly unhappy. An Italian woman shows up to tell Kurylenko that she should just leave him and take control of her life. This woman is then characterized as unstable and dispensed with entirely. Kurylenko does eventually have an affair, so Affleck physically intimidates her and then divorces her. They cry together that the marriage has to end, and she decides to keep his last name. She goes home to France and wanders the woods licking trees, returning finally to the place where the relationship began and reflecting that it was all worth it because it was love for love’s sake.

So, to recap: an identity-free man is universally beloved by gorgeous, fetishized, frequently naked women. His transgressions against them are internalized by those women as personal failures they must strive to overcome, and their transgressions against him can brook no forgiveness. Ah, l’amour.

There is also an almost unrelated thread in which Javier Bardem is an ambiguously faithful priest who goes about his days meeting parishioners and ruminating on his relationship with Jesus. This thread is better in that it is not constantly offensive, but not a lot happens.

And that’s all. The music was nice. The cinematography was lovely. The editing style was distinctive. But the actual narrative content of the film ranged from boring to atrocious. I’m extremely unimpressed.

Wendy Davis and DOMA

I’m still too tired from staying up until 3:30 am last night watching Christopher Dido‘s livestream from the rotunda of the Texas Capitol to do any kind of long writeup, but last night was incredible. Senator Wendy Davis staged a 13 hour filibuster to stall a bill that would close almost all of Texas’s abortion providers. With a little over an hour to go before the special legislative session expired, the GOP used bullshit strongarm tactics to make her shut up, at which point the rest of the democratic senators began a campaign of de-facto filibustering via parliamentary inquiry. Kirk Watson managed to make a question about obvious “germane-ness” of Roe v. Wade to an abortion bill (something the GOP had challenged to make Wendy stop) last about ten minutes. Leticia Van de Putte, who had left her father’s funeral to be there, brought down the house when, after Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst continually refused to recognize her, she asked, “At what point must a female senator raise her hand or her voice to be recognized over her male colleagues?” Finally, with about thirteen minutes to go before midnight, Dewhurst stopped even pretending to listen to the senators and tried to force a vote through. At which point the assembled crowd in the gallery shouted down the legislature in a glorious People’s Filibuster until time expired.

There was some drama thereafter about the GOP trying to claim that the disruption to procedure was a “time out” and they could still vote after midnight, and then more drama when the official record of the vote–originally showing it to have happened at 12:03–was mysteriously changed to 11:59. But in the end the vote died, and Cecile Richards led the people in the rotunda in a chorus of “The Eyes of Texas,” and it was beautiful. For a more extensive writeup, there’s this, and likely many others.

And then, this morning, the wonderful news that the Supreme Court has struck down Prop 8 and the Defense Of Marriage Act as unconstitutional. Of course, just yesterday they gutted the Voting Rights Act in a fashion that, among other things, will likely make it much harder for one Wendy Davis to keep her seat in the Texas Senate. (She won in through a VRA challenge to a redistricting that disenfranchised minority voters.) Scalia’s pissy dissent, in which he calls it “jaw-dropping” that the court should overrule two other branches of government, is especially galling in light of the VRA decision he signed on to literally the day before. But I spend so much of my time being enraged, and have so few pure opportunities for happiness and optimism in the power of big-hearted people to work for and effect positive change. I’m counting today as a win worth celebrating.

Research and Development

This blog post exists primarily as a test of my ability to mirror WordPress content to Twitter, which I think I just enabled. But to make it a little more fun, here’s a video of some significantly more interesting testing. Dr. Tom Murphy VII has had the brilliant idea to use lexicographical ordering as a basis for teaching computers to play videogames. The full paper on his work is here, but more fun is his video of algorithmic weirdnesses as a computer gradually learns to play Mario.

Animation by Julia Pott

I just noticed that one of my favorite animators, Julia Pott, has a new short film out this year, “The Event.” I also notice that I discovered her during the period what I wasn’t updating this website and have never mentioned her on here before. Here’s my favorite of Julia’s films, “Belly,” which stuck in my head for weeks after I first saw it.

Tabclosing

New Tradition

To the best of my knowledge there had never been a class specifically on fantasy at Iowa before, and robots didn’t seem thematically appropriate anyway, so for my Fantasy Fiction Writing class I gave my students tiny Cthulhus to end the term. Here they are, course complete, conquered gods in hand.

(Fantasy) Fiction Writing, University of Iowa, Spring 2013.

(Fantasy) Fiction Writing, University of Iowa, Spring 2013.

Tradition

“It is traditional,” Kevin Brockmeier said, “to end every science fiction workshop at Iowa with gifts of robots.” It was the end of Spring semester 2012, and he had just finished teaching the first such graduate workshop that Iowa had ever offered. He passed a box of wind-up robots around the class. Mine was Bender from Futurama, holding a beer can and a magic wand, wearing a blond wig and a tutu printed with the words, “Gender Bender.”

It’s now the end of the Fall semester of 2012, and I just finished teaching the first Fiction Writing class for undergraduates devoted specifically to science fiction. Seventeen students read and wrote about genre classics, wrote stories of their own, and workshopped the fiction of their peers. At the end, in accordance with tradition, I got them some robots. Here are the intrepid Science Fictionauts of the University of Iowa, with their steadfast automata companions.

(Science) Fiction Writing, University of Iowa, Fall 2012

 

Understanding Plagiarism

Here’s something that I’ve meant to post for a while. When I first came to Iowa I knew that I would be teaching for the Rhetoric department, and was worried (rightfully, it turned out) that my students might have escaped high school with a weak grasp of what constitutes plagiarism. I wanted to make a simple guide I could give as a handout, and teamed up with my cartoonist/game designer friend Fred Wood to make this.

(Click to enlarge.)

The image is sized to fit on an 8.5×11″ piece of paper, and is offered as a creative commons resource.

Creative Commons License
Understanding Plagiarism by Eugene Fischer and Fred Wood is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at https://www.eugenefischer.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/UnderstandingPlagiarism.jpg.

More on the Readercon Harassment Issue

Genevieve Valentine has posted a roundup of further responses to the Readercon Board’s decision not to follow their own harassment policy in punishing Rene Walling. Most notable is that a woman Mr. Walling previously harassed, Kate Kligman, has not only come forward, but revealed that she had privately alerted the Readercon Board to Walling’s history of harassment before the verdict was decided.

This is especially damning. The board’s decision to violate their own policy is unsupportable purely on principle, but to have done so while in possession of evidence that Mr. Walling is a serial harasser should make even the most sympathetic observer suspect cronyism as the primary motivation. It seems to me that, though a zero-tolerance policy may be too blunt an instrument for dealing with all instances of harassment, this case is not a boundary condition. This isn’t someone who went off his meds for a weekend and lost his shit. This is someone with a history of indefensible behavior.

Rose Fox has called for a vote from the convention committee on overruling the board’s decision. I am not familiar enough with the political structure that governs Readercon to fully understand what this means. Hopefully it is evidence that people in power are moving to do what is right: institute the lifetime ban that Rene Walling’s actions call for, and meaningfully apologize for the failure of the Readercon organizers to uphold the trust placed in them by their community.

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