Eugene Fischer

Category: Blog

Repost: The Death of My Dog

I’ve been thinking about and missing my dog lately. This was originally posted on April 24, 2008, on a blog that has since been abandoned. But it’s important to me that I keep the grass around her digital gravestone trimmed, so I’m reposting it here.

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It has taken me a while to write about this.

MuffyO2

Muffy. March 15, 1988 – February 28, 2008.

The above is one of the last pictures of her, taken about a week before her death. She is in an oxygen chamber at an animal hospital. Earlier that Friday she was with the groomer whom she had seen weekly for well over a decade, and who noticed that her tongue and gums had turned blue. My mother and I met the groomer at the animal hospital, where Muffy was diagnosed with heart failure. The x-rays showed her heart was swollen and her lungs filled with something I had heard of before on medically-themed television shows but forgot the second after it was told to me. The relevant part was that they were milky white on the image, and were supposed to be black. We were informed that another hour off of oxygen and she would have expired, that her best chance was to be put on a relatively new vasodialator (“I don’t want to say wonder drug, but I’ve seen amazing things.”), and that she would have to stay in the hospital over the weekend.

The following Monday she came off oxygen and had clear lungs on the x-ray. Her blood work was good and her echocardiogram was indistinguishable from that of a dog without heart disease. The veterinarian was sufficiently optimistic that when we took Muffy home he instructed us to schedule a follow-up with our usual vet in three months.

Muffy lived for another week. I came home during her second to last day of life to discover her making strange, convulsive keening noises that sounded more bird-like than canine. When I let her outside she walked out into the grass and remained hunched over, cawing and wheezing, seemingly unable to defecate and making herself bleed in the attempt. The next day she died.

I wasn’t there when she died, and I never saw her dead body. I was at the Trinity University library, working on a story to submit with my Clarion application. I got a phone call from my parents informing me of Muffy’s passing. I thanked them for telling me, and then continued working. I didn’t really feel anything. The day before, when I had discovered her struggling and gasping I felt panicked and impotent, but I didn’t have an emotional response to her death. I think this was because it had been clear for a long time that she was fading. For the past year I had been taking time specifically to sit with her whenever I was at my parents’ house. She had begun to move very gingerly, and her personality had begun to wane away; for the first time since my childhood I was unable to reliably discern her needs from her actions. And she was nearly twenty years old. The average life span for her breed is 12.2. At the time of her death she was the oldest AKC registered bichon frise in the country, and had been for over a year. While I certainly would not have minded Muffy deciding to live forever, she was a part of my life from baby teeth through bachelor’s degree and it is hard to ask for more than that.

—

And of course I got into Clarion, and the story I was writing in the library when Muffy died was published in Asimov’s two years later, and then I went and got an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where just yesterday I signed a contract to spend some time as an adjunct professor. And through it all, on my keychain, I’ve carried this.

MuffyTag

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.

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.

Tabclosing

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.

On Readercon’s Failure to Enforce Their Harassment Policy

The sequence of events: Genevieve Valentine got harassed at Readercon and bravely came forward about it. The man who harassed her did so repeatedly despite very clear communication that his attentions were unwelcome. Genevieve did not initially name her harasser, choosing instead to address the issue with the Readercon board of directors. Apparently she had interacted with the board in 2008 after a similar incident of harassment (of someone else) by a man named Aaron Agassi, and found their response–banning Aaron for life–appropriate. In the aftermath of the 2008 event the board instituted a zero-tolerance harassment policy. Today Genevieve revealed that the board chose not to enforce their own policy, and are instead suspending the perpetrator, Rene Walling, for two years. The board has issued a statement explaining their decision. They say that Rene was found to be “sincerely regretful of his actions” and that “[i]f, as a community, we wish to educate others about harassment, we must also allow for the possibility of reform.” They also state, “[w]hen we wrote our zero-tolerance policy in 2008 (in response to a previous incident), we were operating under the assumption that violators were either intent on their specific behaviors, clueless, or both.”

In 2008, Aaron Agassi was banned from the con for life, and in 2012 Rene Walling was put on 2-year probation. Also notable, Aaron Agassi was not a well-regarded member of the community, whereas Rene Walling is a frequent blogger for Tor.com and has previously chaired a Worldcon.

I have several thoughts.

1) The establishment of a harassment policy is something to be taken seriously.

Why did the need to allow for the possibility of reform not enter the board’s minds when they were originally establishing the harassment policy? Likely because Aaron Agassi was an apparently super-creepy guy with no friends in the community, and the proximate goal of the harassment policy was to exclude him specifically. That is, to put it mildly, irresponsible. I am actually somewhat sympathetic the the board’s position that their harassment policy should allow for the possibility of reform, but the time to consider that was when they were instituting the policy in the first place. They could have written a tiered policy, with explicit levels of punishment for specific kinds of trespass, and attendees could have then decided whether the punishment schedule made them feel comfortable. But instead they instituted a zero-tolerance policy, and allowed congoers to believe they were governed by it.  So let’s call this Big Mistake #1: instituting a policy that they lacked the conviction to universally enforce.

2) Retroactively changing the policy is a bigger deal than any one incident of harassment.

By retroactively changing their policy, the Readercon board becomes complicit in pattern of well-connected men getting special treatment when they harass women. It doesn’t matter if, absent of other policies, a 2-year probation seems a proportionate response. If the policy is zero tolerance, the facts of the harassment are not in dispute, and tolerance is nevertheless extended, then the harasser has gotten away with it. He was exempted from normal system of punishment. The message that this sends is that the feelings of a harasser are, or at least can be, more important than the feelings of the harassed, and that systems which claim to offer redress in the event of harassment cannot be relied upon. It takes what was an isolated event and elevates it to the level of systemic problem: harassers will get special treatment if they are somehow important and express contrition. (And, while not being at all personally familiar with Rene Walling or his motives, I would note as many others already have that false contrition is a common attribute of a serial abuser.) This will serve to make women feel more at risk, more powerless. Genevieve herself says, “the results of reporting my harassment have been more troubling, in some ways, than the harassment itself.” So, Big Mistake #2: turning an isolated problem into a systemic problem by extending special treatment to a harasser.

3) What the board should have done.

So the board found itself in the position of having a case of clear harassment, but not wanting to issue a lifetime ban to the harasser, despite a zero-tolerance policy. The right course of action would have been to avoid Big Mistake #2 by following the policy, and then, after dealing with this specific circumstance of harassment, begin a process reforming their policy. This would have meant opening up a discussion about harassment and punishment with the Readercon community. It could even have resulted in the creation of an explicit appeals procedure that Rene Walling could have, at some point in the future, availed himself of. Doing this would have been transparent, responsive to the needs of the community, and resulted in a policy that the board could thereafter enforce with conviction.

4) What the board should do now.

I’ve never been to Readercon, so other people may have a more incisive view here. But my answer is: what they should have done in the first place. With the added step of apologizing for fucking up, and promising to take their own policies so seriously in the future that no one can ever suspect they are being applied selectively depending on how much of a Big Name Fan the person in question is.

Tabclosing

Slimming down my browser again.

Myth #4: Scientists follow the scientific method as it was taught in high school: Observation, Question, Research, Hypothesis, Experiment, Conclusion Truth: In reality, the way scientists work is more like: Fiddle Around, Find Something Weird, Retest It, It Doesn’t Happen a Second Time, Get Distracted Trying to Make It Happen Again, Go to Chipotle, Recall the Original Purpose of Your Research, Start Over, Apply for Funding for a Better Instrument, Publish Some Interim Fluff, Learn That Someone Has Scooped You, Take Your Lab in a New Direction, Apply for Funding for the New Direction, Collaborate With an Icelandic Poet, Eat Chipotle With an Icelandic Poet, Co-Write Scientifically Accurate Ode to Walrus, Get Interested in Something Unrelated, Apply for Funding for Something Unrelated, Notice That 20 Years Have Passed.

My Fortune

(Click to enlarge.)

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