That’s the thing. We don’t have a HR that handles that kind of thing. It’s up to the store managers, which is all family. One of the girls called my coworker a asshole for not being gentle enough with a buggy of paint. The consequences, you ask? An apology to me and my coworker. I never recieved one and my coworker never told me if he got one and refuses to talk about it because “she was probably upset so I’m not worried about it.”
so it’d need careful handling of things like Lessa and F’lar’s relationship and such. And maybe, you know, keep Jaxom the hell away from Corana.
I read the original two trilogies in the 80s so I've forgotten some bits, but what were the things that would be problematic today? I don't think I remember any details relating to the above. Lessa is always one of the first people I think of when someone says "so and so was the first strong woman in scifi" and it's a character that came 30+ years later.
I only just read the Amber books a couple of years ago myself; I don't know how I'd missed them. Very much unique stories in my experience, really unlike anything else I've ever read. I did enjoy them, but I think I respected what he did as a storyteller more than I enjoyed them, if that makes any sense.
I read the original two trilogies in the 80s so I’ve forgotten some bits, but what were the things that would be problematic today? I don’t think I remember any details relating to the above. Lessa is always one of the first people I think of when someone says “so and so was the first strong woman in scifi” and it’s a character that came 30+ years later.
So, when the books were originally published, it actually was pretty feminist/forward-thinking that Lessa got to lead Benden Weyr as an equal partner, and she’s the one that saved Pern, and she’s the heroine who gets songs sung about her. Sure, F’lar “saved” her by slaying Fax and bringing her to Benden, but she mind-manipulated him into it so it was really her using him as her tool, and then she went on to save the WORLD all on her own. And that was all pretty forward-thinking, when most SFF of the era had ladies being damsels in distress, or running around in chainmail bikinis.
The bits that haven’t aged well today is how Anne McCaffrey writes romance. Basically, back when the books were written, there was this cultural trope that “good” women didn’t want sex. Like, even if the main gal obviously wanted the romantic lead, you had to put up a show of resisting, of saying no, for some dramatic tension or something, because if you said yes too quickly you were a slutty slut just slutting around or the like. Good girls don’t say yes, even to the people they want, too quickly. And it was “romantic” for the man to be pushy and not take no for an answer.
So McCaffrey has a lot of her lead men “ravishing” their partners in some way after the female resists or says no, which reads as really rapey with today’s understanding of sex and consent. F’lar grabs and shakes Lessa physically at times (I don’t recall if he outright hits her at all or not–he might, once or twice. I’d have to re-read). And Jaxom basically rapes Corana–she says no, but he’s just so horned up by dragons and goes ahead anyway, and the whole scene seems to be some attempt by the author to “show” that Jaxom is as virile a lead as any other dragonman, even if Ruth is asexual. It reads as if she were afraid Ruth not being a bronze would make people doubt Jaxom’s manhood or something, so she writes a scene to supposedly “prove” it.
And then the dragonlust thing during mating flights initially suggests between the lines the queen rider is going to have sex with the bronzerider whose dragon catches her queen, whether she wants to or not. “Aliens made us do it” is totally an old-school SFF trope especially any time a human or alien is telepathic, but again, in modern eyes it’s super-rapey since consent and being able to say no is important.
McCaffrey rolled the rapey sort of thing back in later Pern books as social mores changed going into the 90s–but the books written in the 60s and 70s mostly didn’t age great when it came to romance/sex. So there’s inconsistencies between the Pern portrayed in the early Pern books, vs. the ones written before her death in the 2000s, with the early Pern having some of the “heros” doing kinda awful things, and the later ones sort of forgetting or erasing that.
I don’t think it’d be going against the spirit of the books to update the mores here, though, for a modern audience. Anne McCaffrey was obviously trying to be forward-thinking with certain things, and it’s honestly really hard to be ahead of your time when it comes to the social/cultural stuff, esp. in the pre-internet era.
Personally, if I were to update Pern for a modern audience, I’d keep some of the dragon mating stuff, like I’d purposefully keep some of the huge downsides of being telepathically bonded to a mind that is not fully human and which can cause a human to act in inhuman ways when the dragon gets over-emotional. Mostly so there can be this cultural tension between the Weyrs and the Holds so that the Oldtimer storylines work better. Dramatically-speaking, it’d be a great scene to watch a dragon get hurt–but it’s the dragonman howling and clutching his eye or something, when he clearly isn’t bleeding at all and is getting feedback from his dragon. (Or, dragonwoman…I think I’m recalling Brekke right there.) And there’d be a huge contrast between the weyrs who have fluid relationships with other riders that start and stop on a whim, and the Holds that are very traditional and still do arranged marriages and such.
Also, if the Weyrs are seen as hotbeds of greed and depravity, it’ll be easier to take Pern through a story such as Dragonquest where the Holds and Halls start to rebel against the people who saved them from thread. The Oldtimer storylines from the books. Cultural friction, where the planet’s heroes also act in ways that are strange and different to ordinary men and women, and a way to play with modern cultural concerns too.
But I’d do away with things like the Jaxom and Corana plotline because there’s tons of other ways to make Jaxom an appealing lead character that don’t involve the future Lord of Ruatha Hold abusing his power over a peasant girl. I don’t think a modern audience would consider Jaxom weak or feminine just because Ruth is ace/nonbinary. In fact, him having a possibly nonbinary dragon might be a super-interesting story to follow. ::shrug::
Thanks that was a great analysis. Once you started in I did recall about half those details, but mostly I guess it needs to go on my reread pile since I've forgotten so much.
As a tangentially related side - one of the first emails I ever sent when I first started to use email in about 1996 was to Anne McCaffrey.
I was in the "everything you can imagine is on the internet" phase of just looking up random things, and somehow I found her email address.
I sent her a short note about how much I'd loved her books, and she sent me a brief, nice note back.
That email is long lost to the twists and turns of life - I didn't even understand the concept of keeping backups back then (Edit - that's not true, it would be more accurate to say I just never bothered) - but it was a cool little interaction that I always remember fondly. 🙂
Thanks that was a great analysis. Once you started in I did recall about half those details, but mostly I guess it needs to go on my reread pile since I’ve forgotten so much.
I find, when I re-read, one thing that stays with me is how vibrant and beautiful her narration is. I think the books are still worth reading, but that modern audiences who’ve been participating in more modern discussions around storytelling would recoil at some of the bits we sort of just accepted as being “normal”, as standards for what is “normal” have shifted. The spirit of the books always was forward-thinking, even if she got some stuff wrong.
When Anne McCaffrey did a signing in Chicago when she won her Grand Master award, I had a battered copy of Damia (from her Talents series), and she told me Afra Lyon was her own 2nd favorite character, behind Robinton.
I was on “The New Kitchen Table”, which is where her online fandom ended up in the late 90s for a while, but her fandom was HUGE and had already been around for nigh 20 years with Weyrfest and all at Dragon*Con so aside from the one in-person comment (after I waited hours in a line that twined around the bookstore–the only time since that I’ve seen a bookstore event line that long was for a Harry Potter release), I was very much on the periphery of the fandom vs. those who’d been in it for 20 years already.
My favorite shoes are the Red Wing Iron Ranger's. I worked for them for 3 years and when I left I was gifted my second pair. They're great shoes in everyway. I only wish they had an 8 inch version available in the states. They had one back then in Europe, but nothing stateside. My two sets and the pile of other shoes I got when I worked there have been going strong some years on so I haven't boot shopped in a while, maybe they finally took my advice and did it.
Keeping it clean, I think I’d want hotshot contact lenses, that could provide clear vision in all conditions plus when asked, project for me readable information as though there was a page in front of me. And modes like magnification.
If NSFW allowed, I can think of a few more that would be nice to have. But given the choice, still would prefer the super eyes.
Corruptible assumes they weren’t started for that purpose in the first place.
I wish there was a way to know what the mix of true believers and opportunists involved in each of the religions’ founding. Like the story of Constantine includes elements of both (he wanted a way to increase the unity across the Empire because it was getting hard to convince Iberian Romans to take up arms for wars in the middle East, but there’s also a story that he dreamed about having a cross on this shield leading to winning a battle). That wasn’t the founding of Christianity, but it is the reason Europe adopted it.
Or looking at the old testament, it seems to be a combination of general living advice/laws, events based on actual historic things (like David and Solomon were probably real), and stuff likely made up after the fact (like Genesis). I’d say the ones who made up Genesis weren’t likely true believers (of what they were writing), but it’s hard to say if they believed in the rest of it and just wanted to fill the gaps in good faith, or enjoyed the clerical power and filled in those blanks because not filling them in would have threatened that power. Or some combination of the two.
i’m a simple man: i just want 108 keys split into two panels on a vest. USB-A connector would be fine, maybe even ideal. i’ll jack it into the system i want. i guess it would need a killswitch or something.
Here’s what interests me: obviously on a single instance you need to scale the infrastructure as more users join. But how much do you need to scale to account for the usage of federated instances?
I ask that because the answer in this thread is broadly “it’s sustainable because each instance is low cost, and you can always add more instances” but that doesn’t work if, after the number of instances grows 100x, all existing instances face an increase in costs even if they didn’t gain many more users, because they’re receiving more messages from federated instances, and need to download and store stuff from those other instances for their local users.
That’s a very interesting question and I’m not sure of the answer.
Obviously on some level, the cost of the infrastructure scales with the number of people using it. But so does the ability to crowdfund, if there are 100x more instances then theoretically there would be 100x more potential donors to meet the cost.
One clear way to influence the scaling in our favor would be to utilize instances with clear themes and purposes. If everybody on a particular instance is interested in the same content, that reduces the wasted computational resources compared to an instance where all of the users are interested in different topics, and thus subscribed to a much wider variety of communities.
My intuition is that as long as the platform only hosts text and images, the costs should be manageable, especially with inevitable improvements to computational efficiency that are likely to come as Lemmy matures. For instance, I believe there is some kind of patch that reduces storage utilization that should be shipping with the next version (0.19).
My line of thinking is really wondering about what optimisations are necessary to allow Lemmy to scale in this way. Large social media sites have very interesting designs to deal with the huge amount of data flowing through them, caching as much as possible close to where it will be needed. I don’t know about Lemmy’s design though and I don’t really have a good idea of how that would impact optimisations.
To take an example I remember from reddit (actually I had to re-read about it because I didn’t really remember it…) reddit caches ordered lists of things, for example, the list of posts on the homepage. The problem is that the ordering has to be reevaluated all the time because it can change whenever someone votes. (Let’s assume we’re looking at a listing which incorporates voting). To make that work efficiently the reddit programmers made vote processing actually update not just the backing store and invalidate the cache, but modify the “cache” directly, which is now more like a denormalised view of the backing data. The way this was done meant that later, when the rate of votes increased, there were again problems because all this processing was contending on these denormalised views. I’m thinking this is probably going to be complicated by the federated aspect, because that’s a separate source of updates from those local sources.
I would also say that you can’t expect linear scaling for donations: early adopters are going to be enthusiasts, and correspondingly more enthusiastic with their money!
If they all hang out on communities on the server (more or less), no problemo at all.
But if they all roam around and sign up on thousands of active communities on other servers, my server will be under water.
I love thinking about stuff like this (P=NP, complexity, etc) and I do not see very much about that concerning the lemmyverse which is IMO a shame.
I’m planning setting up a Lemmy build so I can tinker around with it, but you know, time and stuff. I also spent a lot of time just setting up the docker version so maybe it’s quite the job :-)
With those two words polyamory, a practice as old as humanity and in every corner of the world, has been… FINALLY DEBUNKED! I can’t believe I was here for the destruction of a lifestyle!
Lemmy (like Reddit) is about topics, and communities are formed around them. Mastodon (like Twitter/X) is user-centric, and discussions are formed around them. They are simply two different approaches to the social component.
The nature of these social networks makes one more useful for already known users/organizations and less for the common user. In fact, if you want to follow a particular person, Mastodon is more useful, but if you want to talk about some topic in general, Lemmy will always be superior.
I guess that’s particularly what I meant. While mastodon you’d have to build up a following to get anywhere near even the amount of comments on this post right here. Unless you get lucky with one or two posts which can happen, I known an owner of a smaller Mastodon instance (with more then 300 users so not the smallest of small instances but still small.) to manage to get over 100 likes and over 50 boosts on a post, and when they did they linked to it and was like, “ha, see you can get traction on Mastodon.”
I think the language you just used answered your own question: “manage to get”. Those platforms, with likes and retweets, boosts (and to some degree, Karma) are competitive, everyone vying for increased following. Some might follow, comment, retweet or boost genuinely. Most are, at least subconsciously, looking to expand their personal influence.
That attitude obviously also exists here, but it’s tempered by the lack of an endgame. It’s harder to become Internet famous without a scorecard.
This. Additionally Mast/Twitter/bsky is anxiety inducing. You want to post and comment and get a following so that when you want to share a cool 3d print, or a good shit post, it’ll actually get seen. So there’s always this pressure to post something insightful and funny and in-group so that you get followers. Otherwise it’s zero engagement. On bsky specifically there’s a setting that’s on by default where comments with 0 likes don’t get shown. So unless you have followers who like your stuff you’ll literally never be seen.
Here you’ll usually get at least one upvote or down vote.
It was. I tried out bsky because I got a code. It was like re-creating class but on the internet. I don’t want power to consolidate in minorities anymore. Got tired of it super quick.
Am not sure about that working chief…
But asking wont hurt as a last resort.
Refund and if they get stinky, declare to change software. Will probably go very well internally if the company reviews it.
Because Lemmy is a forum type of site, which is designed for discussions; whereas Mastodon is microblogging, which is designed for users to follow people they are interested in.
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