The Readercon program is posted + panels I am on

[kestrell]

Readercon 31
https://www.readercon.org/
will be taking place August 13-15, and will be virtual.
The guests of honor are Ursula Vernon and Jeffrey Ford, with the Memorial Guest of Honor Vonda N. McIntyre.
YouTube will be used to view panels, talks, readings, performances, and events, via links shared in our members-only Discord server
Discord will be used to participate in Q&As, visit virtual fan tables, attend launch parties, chat in kaffeeklatsches, and otherwise interact with program participants and other attendees during and between sessions.

The program can be downloaded in several formats, including an accessible plain text file,
here
https://www.readercon.org/program

I'm on two panels:

Saturday - 2:00 PM
Main Track 1 - I'm In: Infiltration Techniques for Writers - Toni "Leigh Perry" Kelner, Catherynne M. Valente, Kestrell Verlager, Elizabeth Wein, Fran Wilde (mod)
How can characters get into spaces they aren't supposed to be, whether physical or virtual? What makes these scenes feel plausible? Panelists will analyze the literary possibilities in various infiltration techniques--including those that rely on technical skills (such as lockpicking or hacking) and those that rely on social engineering--and suggest useful reference works and successful fictional depictions.

Sunday - 10:00 AM
Main Track 1 - L'État, C'est Quoi? Social Organization in SF/F - Terri Bruce, Ian R. Macleod, Kathryn Morrow, Malka Older (mod), Kestrell Verlager
Let's talk about modes of social organization in science fiction and fantasy: nations, kingdoms, empires, anarcho-syndicalist communes, hives, necromantic capitalism, and more. How do shifts in real-world politics change how we read speculative fiction's use of both real and imagined forms of government? Why is it so hard to make up truly novel social systems, and what does that tell us about how we perceive human (and inhuman) nature?

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Oooh! Infiltration Techniques for Writers sounds boss.

[kestrell]

I know, right? And I have an excuse to do so much research on hacking, social engineering, how to improve your lying, and lockpicking techniques. The problem is that most TV and movies are really crap about this stuff, and I'm not finding a lot of books with good scenes in them. Any suggestions? On a not unrelated note, have you read _Chaos on CatNet_ yet? The fictional Jesse the K has some serious hacker skills in that book.

Character encoding mystery

[jesse_the_k]

I'm seeing some junk characters in the second panel description.

I assume that the snappy title is

l'État, c'est moi

(I typed that l'État, c'est moi using the HTML entity ref for cap E with acute accent)

But on my Mac, I see literally L'État or in words, cap L, apostrophe, capital A with a tilde, per mille sign, lowercase t a t

The per mille sign looks like a percent sign with an extra zero in the denominator. Its HTML entity ref is ‰

I suspect this is down to copying and pasting between Windows and iOS, or copying Windows text into an HTML field

What does JAWS say?

Re: Character encoding mystery

[kestrell]

Now that you mention it, Jaws says the same thing you typed the second time, and yes, I copied and pasted from the plaintext version of the program to my Dreamwidth, so it probably went wrong there but, frankly, that title has been driving me nuts all along in the many incarnations as the program got developed in different formats, which is why I stopped paying attentioin when it sounded wrong. Also, I think I might be the moderator for that panel, and I have no idea how it is supposed tob e ponounced, especially now that Jaws has mangled it. I should really double check these things.

Re: Character encoding mystery

[alexxkay]

It looks to me like Malka Older is moderating that panel.

Re: Character encoding mystery

[kestrell]

Oh, good! Also, sincere apologies for all those typos: obviously, I was typing way past my normal bedtime, and should have been spellchecking.

Re: Character encoding mystery

[jesse_the_k]

Typos are no problem to me -- you regularly decode my posts riddled with missing words, wandering tenses, incoherency, and faulty parallelism.

The phrase l'État, c'est moi is generally attributed to Louis Quatorze, and his identification of himself as the state has been repurposed for other monomaniacal officials.

As far as pronunciation goes, in American eye-dialect, it's "lay TWA say mwah"

Re: Character encoding mystery

[kestrell]

Oooooohhh! I think reading your phonetic pronounciation jiggled a brain cell, because I suddenly got the reference, so thank you!

Setting a new reply record

[jesse_the_k]

The second panel also sounds fascinating.

Have you read Malka Older's Infomacracy books? She combines very inventive world building with complex thriller -- I adored what I could understand, but I think my brain can no longer decode that sort of stuff.

Re: Setting a new reply record

[kestrell]

No, but I'm writing down the title and author's name. I was thinking of all the stories that features groups of disabled characters, or outsiders which include characters with disabilities, such as the group in Theodore Sturgeon's "Mmore Than Human," or John Varley's "Persistence of Vision," or the group of replicants in "Blade Runner," who fail a test developed by others which supposedly can distinguish between humans and replicants. My point is that there are always these outsider groups, and people with disabilities, or those who fail the test of being human, are always part of those outsider groups, no matter how the other forms of social and political organization may change.

Re: Setting a new reply record

[jesse_the_k]

Lucy Jane Bledsoe's The Evolution of Love is a thriller/love story/meditation on "who counts" set in the immediate aftermath of a Californian disaster. (Can't remember whether it was fire or earthquake.) Folks who could got out; disabled people are left behind and create an interdependent mutual aid network to maintain in the ruins. I'm a big Bledsoe fan -- I particularly love her lesbian-Arctic scientist in the 1940s novel, A Thin Bright Line, which is available on Bookshare.

Another story on a similar theme is Nisi Shawl's most excellent The Future of Work in Wired. Shawl brilliantly envisions a care-work collective in a "benevolent" police state. So dense it’s poetry, and worth the reread to understand the web of mutuality and interdependence in the cracks.

Some stuff only Federal dollars bought. Bridie’s medicine, for instance. But Federal welfare checks took care of most of that sort of stuff, and she had set up the Five Petals Care Collective so anything else important could be covered by trading among themselves. She’d spent a lot of time and love on Thought, the First Petal, before getting around to organizing, which was the Second Petal, Action. Worth it. Five Petals Collective payments were food harvested from seeds they sprouted and planted, milk and eggs from animals they raised. Rides. Clothes salvaged from castoffs. The same rich people whose trendy whims had made nonautomated caregiving so expensive provided the collective with plenty of useful garbage.

Re: Setting a new reply record

[kestrell]

Cool, more titles I'm writing down...

Re: Setting a new reply record

[kestrell]

Even the Murderbot books can be interpreted in this light, as Murderbot's very includsion as a person is defined differently according to which political system Muderbot is in: the capitalist consumer system considers Muderbot nonhuman and property, while Murderbot's new planet defines Murderbot as a person, but that definition is inherent in their social and politcal system, in the way they treat all people.

[jesse_the_k]

Murderbot is the first character that comes to mind. It hacks itself several times.

The other is the pair of books by Genevieve Valentine, Persona and Icon, all about hacking ones image in a world where the cult of celebrity becomes political capital — actually also relevant to second panel. I guess that proves both are Zeitgeist-adjacent.

[kestrell]

What about cosmetic surgery and breast augmentation? It's used by people who are already normal to gain further social acceptance in a culture which gives preference to more physically attractive people. There are also some people who take anti-depressants not so much because they are clinically depressed, but because they feel they would be more socially accepted if they had a more upbeat affect, if they were more extroverted, etc. We have kids whose parents have them on Ritalin because the parents and doctors feel the kids entire present and future well-being and even academic and professional success will be impacted by the kid's behavior, which needs to be rehabilitated even from a young age.

Aren't we already indulging in forms of scientific predestination, where we feel we should use prescription drugs and surgical procedures to put us into the class of people who we imagine to be the most successful, the one percenters?

Just to say, aren't we already hacking ourselves? Especially when you see people building their own prosthetics out of Legos or 3D printers.

Given that "tool-user" is a crucial element

[jesse_the_k]

in the definition of humanity ... it's not surprising that we're always hacking ourselves.

I do think it's important for people to understand that Haraway's Cyborg Manifesto grievously omits disabled people's experience, as Jillian Weise explains. But for me, the stigma around psych drugs has locked the gates for people who could genuinely benefit from them. I'm loathe to generalize on Ritalin and Prozac because they've dramatically improved the lives of those close to me, and gate-keepers are always wanting to dismiss our needs.

I'm currently reading Sarah Pinsker's We Are Satellites. She dives deep into a near future where "pilots" installed in one's temple to aid multitasking go from experimental to ubiquitous. Her POV family has one mom who refuses on principal, one mom whose employer pays for its installation, one son who's in an experimental cohort, and one epileptic daughter who can't tolerate it.

Re: Given that "tool-user" is a crucial element

[kestrell]

Thanks for linking to the "tryborg" essay--I remember you mentioning it when I posted a BBC article about how beauty-related prosthetics are becoming high fashion for models and celebrities. Okay, I need to walk away from the computer now: I've been online since 6:30 this morning...

Re: Given that "tool-user" is a crucial element

[jesse_the_k]

Enjoy your nap!

This got my intrigued so I registered for Readercon.

Re: Given that "tool-user" is a crucial element

[jesse_the_k]

Sarah Pinsker writes short stories before she writes novels. Pay Attention in 2015 sketches out the issues addressed in full in We Are Satellites.