This one is public, so feel free to share if you like. Transcript below:
Hi, all. Welcome to this episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
Today, I talk about confronting aliens.
Okay, more like… today I talk about Baen’s Bar, because it’s inevitable that I talk about Baen’s Bar. For those of you who aren’t involved with the legacy science fiction publishing industry, Baen is only remaining publisher that seems committed to popcorn entertainment, the kind of stories that remind you of blockbuster summer movies: explosions, adventure, excitement. I enjoy a lot of Baen’s catalog—notably I went through a lot of it just after childbirth because dealing with incessantly female stuff made me crave some balance in my life, and balance to me felt like participation in interplanetary wars. (what can I say, it worked for me.)
Anyway, Baen has had a forum for so many years its forum software looks like it crawled off a BBS, and if you remember the wild west days of the internet where Usenet was a neverending flamewar, then you’ll understand what I mean when I say there are subforums on Baen’s Bar that take you back to times where speech was so free it reached through the screen and punched you in the eyes.
It is naturally inevitable that in the 2020s, the rhetoric there is defined by people in power in the industry as hatespeech.
I’m not really moved by this definition when the people who are calling it out never did anything about the hatespeech that’s been aimed at me, for decades, even when I spoke out about it. Even when it happened on their forums and their servers, which they never shut down to save this particular ‘woman of color’ from violence. It’s clear to me that this is a case where hatespeech is okay when used against your enemies, but not when it’s used against you, and I have no time for that kind of hypocrisy. I guess I can talk about it more if y’all want me to, but it’s not really the focus of this ramble… which is this thing that jumped out at me subsequent to the explosion of talk about Baen’s Bar.
…and that’s the number of people who proudly state that if you do not agree with them ideologically, they are willing to cut off ties with you.
This is bad enough in the normal populace. But it staggers me that it’s a thing in the science fiction arena. Because what is science fiction for, if not to confront the alien? How many of us fell in love with the genre because it was exciting to seek out new worlds and new civilizations? To meet the Other and discover all the congruencies and the frictions of competing worldviews? What is first contact, except an opportunity to expand one’s own horizons by grappling with ideas and beliefs we don’t share? And then, in exhilarating moments, to find the commonalities, framed in a new context that makes them shine like the glass in a cathedral window?
To hear science fiction authors and fans proclaim proudly that they don’t want to associate with people who aren’t like them… I don’t even know what to say to that. I thought we were the explorers, the negotiators, the listeners, the pioneers. What I want from my fiction is the excitement and danger of the alien shore. And there’s no wonder without that danger, and the danger is that you will be uncomfortable, you will be challenged, and you will have to reassess your values in a context where they might not apply.
How you confront the alien says a lot about you. How you frame the process of engaging with the alien does, too.
Ironically, the people who claim the writers and fans of Baen’s work are shoot-‘em-up types who enjoy books that cast the Other as enemy… are the ones who are advocating, in real life, for the Othering of people, actual human beings, with alien ideas. They are responding to caricatures, like someone deciding that Martians are little green men without sending a rover to Mars to find out. And they’ve decided those caricatures are too dangerous to exist, and it gives them great pleasure to start the interplanetary wars to extirpate them.
I can’t do that. And I wouldn’t be proud of it if I could. I prefer to know and count as dear people of many different beliefs, walks of life, and life experiences… than to decide in advance what I think of those people, and cut them off forever. I have grown more as a person, and honed my ideas in contests with other ideas, through my willingness to let other speak, and not discount them. I would hope that those of us who dream of the stars, and first contact, would as well.
Anyway, that’s all I got. Thanks for listening to this questing heart. Jaguar out.
Or at least, I intend it to be relaxing. Hopefully it delivers.
4:22 minutes
Materials:
- Pen: Moonman Starry Glass dip pen, Mars: https://www.jetpens.com/Moonman-Starry-Sky-Glass-Dip-Pen-Mars/pd/31536
- Paper: Strathmore Writing Series 500, lined: https://www.jetpens.com/Strathmore-500-Series-Writing-Pad-8.5-x-11-Lined-50-Sheets/pd/15322
- Ink: Robert Oster, Rose Gilt Tynte: https://www.jetpens.com/Robert-Oster-Rose-Gilt-Tynte-Fountain-Pen-Ink-Shake-N-Shimmy-50-ml-Bottle/pd/25170
In which I talk about the paper, the paint, and the experience of oils versus gouache. Fun stuff, will do more.
Thank you Locals supporters! Your contribution to my art war chest here is what's powering these experiments and videos. For now I'm keeping them public but I may start doing some subscriber-only videos if you all are interested.💖
Thanks for your comments yesterday on the business post... all very provocative, in a good way. I'll try to respond to all of them today.
Some Alysha misc now, since I'm gearing up for the results of the Kickstarter!
Petrov is giving away coupon codes for every book in the Alysha series (and has some leftover coupons for Marda and the business book). You can pick those up here (and please do! The books are bought already, someone should use them!) https://twitter.com/PetrovNeutrino/status/1457344535843987461
Our own @JudasComplex sent along a sample of the Faith in the Service audiobook, which I've attached for your delight! I... haven't had a chance to listen to it. Don't ask me about my past week and a half or so. Putting it here will guarantee I get to it.
After hearing the amused comments during the livestream, I went ahead and added all the ship type illustrations I have inked from the 90s to the wiki. Glory in the rampant adorableness of their anthropomorphic stylings! See those ...
A little comedy today, at least in the link. Transcript follows.
Hi, all. Welcome to this episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
A while back I was introduced to a comedy sketch about Cuban coffee by a Mexican comedian, Gabriel Iglesias. ( The sketch begins with him greeting all his fellow Latinos and then backing up to say ‘but we’re all different, aren’t we’ which is a segue into a demonstration of how different Hispanics speak Spanish.
It is hilarious. First, because I am a Spanish speaker and a linguistics hobbyist, and his portrayal of various accents resonated with my experiences in trying to make sense of them myself… Not always easy, since from culture to culture, slang and accent are often totally different (and sometimes grammar! Spaniards use a grammatical construct that has died out in many other Spanish-speaking countries, the plural “you.”)
I also loved it because the Cuban coffee part is real. I grew up with Cubans. I know how we are....
One of the most common things I hear (and say) right now is "the asymmetry is the story." Here's one about how none of us are innocent of the sins we hate in others.
Hi, all. Welcome to this week’s episode of The Jaguar’s Heart.
It’s been weeks since the Baen’s Bar incident and I’m still thinking about it... because the longer I do, the more I feel, overwhelmingly, that it’s obvious that the problem is deeper than “this forum was saying stuff that offended us.” We have to back up to the glaring fact that people on opposite sides no longer consider each other human. Nothing I say will matter because the people disagreeing with me don’t think I’m human. They have denied my humanity; they have not bothered to listen to my beliefs, or have fake-listened to them in that way that people do when they’re so ready to prove you wrong that they’re only using your speech to provide talking points for their own ideas.
We have forgotten how to listen.
Increasingly, we have also ...
What if I told you that, after years of requests for the return of my Stardancer.org gallery, I was in the process of recreating it?
Because I am…! RIGHT NOW. flail
CHALLENGES
First, let me tell you why I haven’t had an online art gallery since stardancer went down:
I did not want to put thousands of images on free gallery sites (like DA) because it would be a ton of work, and I wouldn’t have any control over the site (“what if they go down one day”, “what if they start charging per-upload fees”, “what if they have copyright policy changes I don’t like”, “what if they start using their corpus to train AI”, etc, etc, etc). Can you imagine dumping hundreds of hours into uploading stuff only to lose it because the site owners made questionable decisions? Ugh.
I wasn’t capable of coding my own gallery and I didn’t like the gallery plugins for various content management systems. I could have installed a package on my hosting service, but none of the ones I saw were customizable enough, or did ...
I'm just about done collecting all my notes to begin "Red Honey", a lot of which involves looking for sketches... and this one, I overlooked until just now, is of Kediil and Serel. I love toned sketchbooks! They are so satisfying.
Anyway, next week, we begin!
We’re just about at the midpoint of 2025, so I thought today would be a good day to do a Jaguar check-in! What a weird year it’s been. Very busy, family-wise, with lots of both good and challenging changes; I am using up a lot of time on that, but how is that news? You know how it goes.
My current major project is finishing up the second Jokka collection and mailing all the Kickstarter prizes. That should be wrapped up next month sometime, when we start the Red Honey serialization. I tell you, it’s a wild to be scanning old sketchbooks, only to find sketches of the Red Honey characters from the 2000s! This story has been on the backburner a long time! I also unearthed a lot of sketches from the development of the jokka.org website, which I used the wayback machine to archive (as much as possible). I’m thinking of restoring some amount of it to my current website, which is my other major project right now: my website. I feel like ...
We once allowed our neuters to rule us; they raised up a glittering kingdom, one that rotted from its core the longer we permitted that offense against nature to continue. When we refused to address that imbalance, the Brightness and the Void Themselves smote the World, so powerfully that nothing was left of that time save fearful rumors, whispered across generations.
To this day, the World suffers from the blow Its divine siblings struck against It. We should be more careful of our virtue… or we may not survive the second lesson.
