kestrell | Entries tagged with media studies

This past week Alexx and I rewatched "Barton Fink" (Dir. Coen Brothers, 1991), which is one of my *favorite* movies, and when I say "favorite movies," I mean it is one of those movies which causes me to babble on like the movie geek I can be which, fair warning, this post is all about.

There are many reasons to love "Barton Fink": it's a Coen Brothers film with the usual wonderfully quirky performances, including a really funny/terrifying performance by John Goodman.

The reasons I love this film are 1, it's a movie about making movies in Hollywood and 2, it has one of the most innovative and impressive sound designs of any film, ever. It's the film that made me--and many other people-- really sit up and pay attention to how sound design could become a significant part of the narrative of the film, instead of something tacked on as an after thought.

Regarding this last, if you do an online search for films with the best sound design, "Barton Fink" will show up in the top three almost every time ("Apocalypse Now" often shows up as number one).

Having spent the past week researching and reading about "Barton Fink," I thought I would share some of mthe best resources I found.

"Barton Fink" is a movie about making movies in Hollywood circa 1941, and much of the sense of time and place is taken from books written by writers who were actually writing in Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s. These included many writers such as Raymond Chandler, Nathaniel West, and William Faulkner, who is the basis for W. P. Mayhew. Another book used by the Coens was Otto Freidrich's City of Nets, about German expatriates living in Hollywood in the 1940s. An astounding amount of the dialogue and some of the character details are taken from these books.

The most complete exploration of the literary influences of "Barton Fink" I found is
"Barton Fink: ‘For the Common Man’" in _The Cinema of the Coen Brothers_ by Jeffrey Adams (2015, Columbia University Press) (available on Bookshare.org)

Online resources which provide a similar exploration but which is not quite as extensive are

15 Fiery Facts About 'Barton Fink' | Mental Floss
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/67383/15-fiery-facts-about-barton-fink

and

How the Sausage Gets Made: Inside the Hollywood Film Industry in Barton Fink and Hail, Caesar! by M. Keith Booker
https://bookerhorror.com/how-the-sausage-gets-made-inside-the-hollywood-film-industry-in-barton-fink-and-hail-caesar/
(this article can also be found in _The Coen Brothers' America_ (2019) by M. Keith Booker)

If you are interested in film sound, the ultimate online resource is
FilmSound.org: dedicated to the Art of Film Sound Design & Film Sound Theory
http://www.filmsound.org/

The following article provides a basic introduction to what sound design is and what a sound editor does, and then gets into exploring the sound design of "Barton Fink."

When Sound Is a Character
By Judith Shulevitz
Aug. 18, 1991
Posted online at
https://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/18/movies/film-when-sound-is-a-character.html

This is an academic article which is part of a journal issue on sound design in film
Barton Fink: Atmospheric Sounds of the Creative Mind
Sound Practices of the Coen Brothers
by Randall Barnes
https://offscreen.com/view/barnes_bartonfink

As I said, "Barton Fink" shows up on most links of best film sound design, and here is a great example:

The Films That Influenced a Sound Design Master
https://www.filmmakeru.com/blog/the-films-that-influenced-a-sound-design-master

"Barton Fink" is filled with many small but anxiety-producing details, and one of these is the motif of the shoes. We always see empty shoes, but never the people they belong to. This reminded me of folklore associated with shoes and death, but also of concentration camp pictures of piles of shoes ("Barton Fink" has other references to World War 2 and fascism).

Folklore abounds with stories of shoes and the dead. In times past, it was thought worthy to make a gift of a pair of new shoes to a poor person at least once in a lifetime. The belief was that, in the afterlife, the person would have to cross barefoot surfaces of thorns and gorse. If one had given shoes to a poor person during life, an old man at the beginning of one's journey would meet one with the same shoes to travel over the thorns without scratch or scale.
This belief is most memorably and creepily covered in
the Lyke Wake Dirge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgr65_MPVEo&ab_channel=stewuk

Old boots and shoes are commonly found in cemeteries as gravesite remembrances. From Canada to New Orleans modern finds of shoes of various styles have been found draped across and or surrounding grave sides. According to Heck and Heck, the modern practice was inspired by Canadian songwriter Felix Leclerc’s (1914 – 1988) song, “Moi, Mes Souliers” (Me, My Shoes).

foot talk: Dead Men’s Shoes : A brief history of funereal footwear and toe pointing
http://foottalk.blogspot.com/2020/06/dead-mens-shoes-brief-history-of.html

and here are some more pictures and folklore about shoes and the dead, especially in New Orleans
https://diggirl.wordpress.com/2017/01/16/565/

the infamous "Paul is dead" conspiracy theory, when Paul McCartney was pictured not wearing shoes on the album cover of "Abbey Road."
http://feetshoesandsuperstition.blogspot.com/2008/10/feet-shoes-and-superstition-dead-mens.html

Kes: I'm not a Twitter user, so this is mostly posted as a point of reference for future me, say, a year or two from now.
I'm also not a programmer or a person knowledgeable regarding how to run a major media company, but firing all of the top executives, threatening to fire 75% of the employees, and then talking about turning the product that does one or two things into a product that does *everything*--well, that sounds a little nuts, doesn't it?

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-twitter-deal-chaos/

Right off the bat, I need to tell you, this isn't a review. I could have reviewed the first three/quarters of this two-part film, the part where George Carlin hones his persona--because we get to hear, through George Carlin's own words, that this isn't just an act, it's his own transformation we're being witness to--as a standup comic, where he's cracking jokes, making the audience laugh, playing with words.

And Carlin didn't just play with words: he frolicked, he capered, he staged a three-ring semiotic circus.

But along about the mid-eighties, and definitely by the '90s, George Carlin stopped playing, and his words turned deadly.

While watching the recordings of Carlin's live shows in the 1990s, I kept thinking of those Celtic bards who could curse a king with their song.

But it gets darker than that, much darker, because at one point near the end of the movie there is a montage of all the things George Carlin raged against and his words play over a visual montage of our recent news stories, and you realize this is a man who was seventy-one when he died, and he knew he was dying, and he spent the final decade of his life yelling at us to stop fucking up, because he wanted to warn us that we don't have that many chances left to stop fucking up.

You can read more about the film at this link, and also catch some sound clips. I'm also not surprised at NPR actually censoring and refusing to utter the dirty words, even now, and doesn't the "On Air" show air at night anyway?

https://www.npr.org/2022/05/20/1100342905/american-dream-documentary-examines-george-carlins-triumphs-and-demons

but this article is printed with some fancy font that is filled with characters that are unreadable by my screen reader.

My ironies surpass all others.

Here is the article so others can read it and hey, look, he's telepathic, too! So it's as if you rolled Geordie, Counselor Troy, and O'Brien all into one character...cooool....

On 'Strange New Worlds,' Meet The Blind Telepathic Engineer
'Star Trek: Strange New Worlds' co-stars Bruce Horak as Hemmer. Bruce Horak is a Visually Impaired Performer Creator, according to his website. He's an actor, playwright, composer, visual artist, and other things, so that sounds about right. He's also legally blind, seeing about 9% of what the average person does. On May 5, 2022, the relatively unknown Canadian co-stars in "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds," the latest installment of the venerable franchise. Horak portrays Hemmer, a blind telepathic Aenar who works as an engineer on the USS Enterprise. A company Hemmer is a tyrant at work, but he's also a miracle worker:
https://technotrenz.com/entertainment/on-strange-new-worlds-meet-the-blind-telepathic-engineer-1870634.html

Article from Psychology Today
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-sensory-revolution/202101/lego-braille-bricks-help-blind-children-learn-read#:~:text=LEGO%20is%20rolling%20out%20a,a%20match%20made%20in%20heaven.

The Lego Braille Bricks website
https://www.legobraillebricks.com/

Matthew Shifrin, a blind musician and activist, has been a motivating force behind much of Lego's decision to make its bricks accessible.
Lego just released audio and Braille instructions - The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2019/08/28/lego-just-released-audio-braille-instructions-they-did-it-because-blind-man-who-never-gave-up/#main-content

and here is Matt's original websitew
Lego for the Blind
http://legofortheblind.com/about/
and here is Matt back in 2019 as a guest on Henry Jenkins's podcast, "How Do you Like It So Far," talking about his many projects, including joining urban explorers in the tunnels under MIT
https://www.howdoyoulikeitsofar.org/episode-46-matthew-shifrin/

The Hidden Image Descriptions Making the Internet Accessible
Three different alt text examples over a blank box.
Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, the Mona Lisa.
A painting of a person.
May be an image of one person and strawberry.
Mona_Lisa,_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci,_from_C2RMF_retouched.jpg
Example alt text descriptions from Microsoft Word, Facebook and Wikipedia.

Leonardo da Vinci’s painting, the Mona Lisa.
By Meg Miller and Ilaria Parogni
Feb. 18, 2022
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/18/arts/alt-text-images-descriptions.html?smid=em-share

The text boxes above are examples of alt text, which people who are blind or have low vision often rely on when navigating the web. When it’s available, the text can be detected and read aloud or translated into Braille through screen readers, assistive technology that can be accessed in the form of software programs, apps or even browser extensions. For these users, alt text is essential to the online experience.

But it is not always available, or even helpful. Haben Girma, a lawyer and disability rights advocate, said she frequently comes across words like “‘image,” “jpg” or “graphics” when navigating the web with a screen reader. “That doesn’t tell me anything,” she added.

And in an image-saturated world — over 63 million were uploaded to Instagram alone in a single day in February, according to
Internet Live Stats
https://www.internetlivestats.com/
— it can be difficult for people who are blind or have low vision to fully experience the web.

Three alt text examples for an image of pancakes.
Five small pancakes on a plate topped with raspberries, blueberries, lemon zest and syrup.
May be an image of fruit.
A slice of pizza sitting on top of a white plate.
A plate of pancakes with fruit.
Examples of A.I.-generated alt text from Facebook, Alt Text Chrome Extension and Microsoft Word.

Five small pancakes on a plate topped with raspberries, blueberries, lemon zest and syrup.
Partly in response to this changing landscape, disability rights advocates, people with vision-related disabilities and technologists alike have been coming up with ways to increase the presence and the quality of alt text.

Alt text is usually tucked away in a web page’s HTML code, the language that defines how information will appear on a browser. Screen readers can access the information and translate it into a format that users can interact with, but for those without the assistive technology, alt text would not be apparent.

A kitten at the window.

This is the code that contains the image’s alt text. Here’s what a screen reader would sound like when encountering this image.

Many social media platforms have features that enable people to add alt text to their posts manually. On sites that permit a longer word count on posts, like Instagram, people may even include the description of the image they are sharing in the caption accompanying it.

Despite the presence of these options, the practice remains little known and mystifying to many.

One analysis of a million homepages, by
WebAIM,
https://webaim.org/projects/million/
a nonprofit organization affiliated with Utah State University that focuses on web accessibility, found that as of February 2021, 60.6 percent had instances of missing alt text. A Carnegie Mellon
study
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jbigham/pubs/pdfs/2019/twitter-alt-text.pdf
in 2019 of 1.09 million tweets with images found that only 0.1 percent of those tweets included alt text. (The New York Times has been working on rolling out alt text for its images.)

Three alt text examples for one image containing President Joe Biden.
President Joe Biden, wearing a medical mask, walking down a flight of stairs out of a green helicopter. Three men in uniform salute him with their right arms from the ground.
May be an image of 5 people, people standing and outdoors.
A group of people standing next to a train.
A group of men standing next to a helicopter.
Examples of A.I.-generated alt text from Facebook, Alt-Text Chrome Extension and Microsoft Word.

President Joe Biden, wearing a medical mask, walking down a flight of stairs out of a green helicopter. Three men in uniform salute him with their right arms from the ground.
In Search of Solutions
Some companies have turned to artificial intelligence to increase the presence of alt text. Microsoft and Google have both developed features that use A.I. to automatically generate alt text. In 2016,
Facebook debuted its own “automatic alt text,”
https://engineering.fb.com/2016/04/04/ios/under-the-hood-building-accessibility-tools-for-the-visually-impaired-on-facebook/
which uses A.I. to identify objects in images, which it also added to Instagram in 2018. (Instagram Stories does not have an option for alt text.) Cynthia Bennett, a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute, who is blind and uses a screen reader, said that artificial intelligence and automation have enabled alt text to be generated much more widely. But the descriptions she comes across, she added, “tend to not be very high quality.”

A.I.-generated text can indeed be puzzling: “I have been in situations where the A.I. will say, ‘A person holding a gun,’ and that person is not holding a gun,” Girma said. “The A.I. got confused. Or it says, ‘A child in a chair.’ But it’s not a child; it’s an adult.”

An industry has also sprung up to address issues of quality and scale, with some companies taking a human-based approach and others working on auto-generated alt text.

One company, Scribely, offers alt text written by people. Its chief executive, Caroline Desrosiers, said that while A.I. can identify objects, humans are far better at deciding which parts of an image are important to describe. Also, she said, “Alt text needs to be short and succinct, so we have to make a call on which details that we choose to highlight.”

The start-up CloudSight focuses instead on mustering the power of algorithms. Brad Folkens, the chief executive and co-founder of the company, said that its A.I. had to rely on human review in its early stages of development, to ensure the quality of its descriptions. But, he added, the technology has since evolved to be able to function independently. It “does a good enough job” for CloudSight’s clients, he said. (The company still offers human-reviewed services at a premium.)

Some disability rights advocates say that A.I. alt text is improving — yet still often misses the context and what Chancey Fleet, a disability rights advocate and tech educator, calls the “emotional valence” of a human description. “For example, a photo from a Black Lives Matter protest would be something like ‘people street demonstration,’” Fleet said, “and that just does not suffice in moments of importance.”

Three alt text examples for one image of the Poler Napsack.
A bright red sleeping bag with drawstrings near the base, a retractable hood, a front pocket and zipper that spans the top half of the sleeping bag.
The our pick for the best wearable lleeping bag the Poler Napsack.
a person holding a pair of skis in the snow.
A picture containing work-clothing.
Alt text examples from Wirecutter, The New York Times’s product recommendation service; Alt Text Chrome Extension; and Microsoft Word.

A bright red sleeping bag with drawstrings near the base, a retractable hood, a front pocket and zipper that spans the top half of the sleeping bag.
The Push for Alt Text
The inclusion of alt text is a no-brainer to those championing its consistent, wider use.

Some observers, like Thomas Reid, a voice actor and podcast host who is blind, say that social media is helping them broadcast their message and make people more aware. “We’re having these conversations in public, and it’s easy to jump into them,” Reid said.

Girma, who is blind, regularly uses her Instagram and Twitter accounts to invite others to write alt text for the images they post online, as well as to share suggestions on
how to craft alt text
https://twitter.com/habengirma/status/1279546896218873857
and to
direct followers to useful resources.
https://twitter.com/habengirma/status/1345809172298780674
“You don’t need to describe every leaf and detail. Write one or two sentences describing the main point of the image,” the caption of one of
her Instagram posts reads.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CJmEVyRMzRV/

She is not the only one providing detailed advice on social media.
In a Twitter post
https://twitter.com/BlondeHistorian/status/1422287809524678663
, a blind activist, Amy Kavanagh, advises her followers to think about context: “If it’s a fashion picture, tell me about the clothes. If it’s a group photo, I don’t need every outfit described.”

Imani Barbarin, a communications professional and disability rights advocate, uses
her TikTok account
https://www.tiktok.com/@crutches_and_spice/video/6951479973194632453?is_copy_url=1&is_from_webapp=v1&lang=en
to urge others in her industry to include alt text in their resources for brands and nonprofits: “That’s part of your job,” she says in one video, “you have to include it.”

Alt text from Getty Images for a stock photo hosted there.
A diverse group of five people in office attire looking up at the camera, smiling, raising their fists.
Teamwork saves the day : Stock Photo
a group of people standing next to each other.
A group of people jumping.
Examples of alt text from Getty Images, Alt-Text Chrome Extension and Microsoft Word.

A diverse group of five people in office attire looking up at the camera, smiling, raising their fists.
The artists Bojana Coklyat and Shannon Finnegan have taken a robust approach with
Alt Text as Poetry
https://alt-text-as-poetry.net/
— a website, workbook and series of workshops — in their effort to encourage the use of alt text among artists and on social media.

“When you’re online or on Instagram to have fun or feel a sense of belonging, and you’re constantly getting these dry, minimal descriptions, it takes away from that delight or pleasure,” said Coklyat, who has low vision.

Finnegan and Coklyat said that when people use expressive or playful alt text on social media, in either the HTML or written into a caption, they can expose others to the practice, and inspire them to try it.
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I recently read about Vizling, an app being developed by Professor Darren Defrain, who was awarded $100,000 from the National Endowment for Humanities, to help visually impaired people read comics. (The app is currently undergoing testing and is expected to launch in June.)

Some sighted people ask, "Why would a blind person care about comics?" and, since I have a personal history with comics, I thought I would write about some of my experiences.

I grew up with low vision in my left eye, and totally blind in my right eye, but I was both a bookworm and an art student, so I was a very visual person. I was that kid in the class that other kids would come to and ask to draw horses, unicorns, or monsters. As a teenager, I used to visit the local comics store. I even pre-ordered and waited in line to get my copy of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns.

Years after I went blind, I met a man who asked me out a couple of times, but I turned him down, until one day he offered to read me a comic he had told me about. A little over a year later, we got married. The graphic novel he read to me was From Hell, and that's why I refer to Alan Moore as our Cupid. Alexx, my husband, is a serious comics geek. No, I mean, geekier than that. I mean, thanks to Alexx, I have the fact that Clancy Brown played the voice of Lex Luthor in the animated TV series of Superman embedded in my brain. When, in the original broadcast of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Xander made a joke about red Kryptonite that fell flat with his female friends, I turned to my Alexander and said, "Tell me about the red Kryptonite," and he explained the reference. Now, "Tell me about the red Kryptonite" is our cue for geeking out about comics.

Thus, when I was taking a comics course with Henry Jenkins in the media studies program at MIT, Alexx was my reader and describer of comics. My personal favorite was David Mack's Echo. Echo is a deaf Native American, and she is often dismissed as merely being one of Daredevil's ex-girlfriends. But she is so much more than that. You know she is seriously kickass when Wolverine shows up as her spirit guide. HER SPIRIT GUIDE. I love you, Echo!

As for other superheroes with disabilities, I also love Oracle. Formerly Batgirl, she took the name Oracle after she became disabled, and transformed herself into a superhacker.

It's these self-transformations in response to disability and trauma, the intentional creation of personae (from the Greek word for masks) and alter egos, that fascinate me. When I lost the last of my functional vision in my early twenties, I originally thought of myself in terms of relearning how to do all the things I already did, staying the same person, rising like a phoenix from the ashes of my old life.

Then it struck me how boring that would be.

That phoenix remains the same phoenix forever, never changing.

So I decided I would be a shapeshifter, a trickster, someone who, rather than feeling compelled to stay within the lines and do everything just like everyone else (i.e., sighted/"normal" people), I would instead invest all that time and energy trying new things.

Which is how I ended up going back to college to complete my undergraduate degree, becoming a disability advocate, and then attending MIT as one of Henry Jenkins's grad students.

The heavily drawn lines of borders or frames may seem to act as restrictive boundaries but, in the comics I love, they are more like thresholds, a liminal marker which the character might step, fall, fly, or explode out of at any moment. A character's persona might be "killed" figuratively or literally, through trauma, tragedy, or murder (often prompted by the hiring of a new writer and/or artist), but there is always the opportunity for some shapeshifting.

If you do a web search on the topic of comics and disability, you will find hundreds of posts by fans with disabilities, and also academic papers by scholars, some with disabilities, some not, writing about comics and people with disabilities. In recent years, however, creators of comics and movie studios have been compelled to listen to people with disabilities and frame these characters with more respect and realism. In the past few months, we've had the release of The Eternals with a deaf character, and the Disney+ series Hawkeye, which features both a main protagonist with hearing aids and Echo herself (it's rumored that Echo will also be getting her own series).

During the pandemic, Alexx and I have been reading one of my comfort comics, Squirrel Girl and, although the comic has ended, there were a couple of novels I hadn't read. It turns out that the novels feature a junior high Doreen Green before she becomes Squirrel Girl, and she meets a friend, Ana Sophia, who is deaf. At one point, Doreen says, "Someone once said with great power comes great accessibility -- no wait, that doesn't sound right." Trust me, it was a good phrase and, like, really inspiring. (The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl: 2 Fuzzy, 2 Furious, Shannon Hale and Dean Hale [2018]).

In trying to locate the earliest occurrence of this phrase, I came across this post about Stan Lee's death: With Great Power Comes Great Accessibility – How the Death of Stan Lee Affects the Disability Community - Rooted in Rights by Patrick Cokley, which discusses Stan Lee's creation of characters with disabilities, including his co-creation of the X-Men, which has become a major source of identification for many people with disabilities, and even more LGBT people.

Finally--and this is a connection with comics which I always carry with me, but which I often forget about--I have a pair of prosthetic eyes. About a decade ago, I needed to get a new pair and I decided to ask my ocularist (the technician who creates the prosthetic eyes) to make mine to look like Delirium's eyes in Neil Gaiman's Sandman graphic novel. Delirium has one bright blue eye, and one bright green eye and, to follow up on my idea of shapeshifters, most of Delirium's appearance--her hair color, her hair length, her style of clothing--and she is the epitome of whimsy. What I really liked about this idea was that people with prosthetic eyes are always portrayed in media as having these absolutely obvious, ugly eye prosthetics but, in truth. prosthetic eyes are designed to match each individual person's original eyes (unless you're like me), and the the technicians who create them take hours, over a period of days, to make them. I loved the idea of having prosthetic eyes based on art. Also, I met Neil Gaiman at a convention some time later, and he pronounced them "Perfect."

In closing, I want to point out that comics are a major part of our culture, whether we experience them in graphic novels, movies, novels, toys, video games, T-shirts, tattoos, or a hundred other forms of media. Media is a shared source for how we communicate with one another, how we spend time with one another, how we form our ideas of heroes, and friends, and virtues, and a dozen other concepts.

Most of all, comics are built on the foundation of being able-bodied versus disabled. All we have to do is look at one of the ultimate comics heroes, Captain America, who started out as a disabled young man who used crutches. He used to get beat up by bullies, but he always got back up again, saying, "I can do this all day." And then he participated in a secret Army experiment and became the superhero Captain America, who is not only physically strong but morally the most virtuous of the Avengers (he can even wield Thor's hammer, Mjölnir). More than any other superhero, Captain America literally embodies the synthesis of physical and moral integrity, and even social integrity in his role of "Cap," the older, fatherly leader of the Avengers.

So, considering all the ways that comics present and represent images of people with disabilities, it's past time that we find ways to make comics more accessible to people with disabilities themselves. In the disability movement we have a saying, "Nothing about us without us," and, in creating a more inclusive conversation regarding the many intersections of disability and comics, projects such as Vizling need to be supported and encouraged both by academics and fans.

Then check out virtual Boskone Feb. 18-20!

Boskone 59 will be happening February 18-20, 2022, and it will be a hybrid event, but for anyone interested in exploring the intersection of disability and science fiction, many of the most fascinating events will be virtual. The Guest of honor is writer Ted Chiang, but Boskone will also feature two amazing female writers with disabilities who will be reading and speaking about their fiction and participating in panels about how to create more inclusive spaces.

Elsa Sjunneson-Henry is a Hugo Award-winning speculative writer and a disability rights activist. in 2018 she was the Co-Guest Editor in Chief of
Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction
https://uncannymagazine.com/issues/uncanny-magazine-issue-twenty-four/
Her new memoir, _Being Seen: One DeafBlind Woman's Fight to End Ableism_,
https://www.snarkbat.com/being-seen
is available to registered readers with disabilities as a downloadable audiobook on Bard and also on Bookshare.org. Read about her many other writing credits and her activism at https://www.snarkbat.com/about

Ada Palmer
https://adapalmer.com/
is a professor of Renaissance history and an award winning writer, who also maintains the history blog Ex Urbe, where you can read
her Campbell Award and Invisibility Disability speech
https://www.exurbe.com/campbell-award-invisible-disability/
The book for which she won the award, _Too Like the Lightning_ (2016) is available from Bard, while Bookshare has Palmer's non-fiction scholarly work, _Reading Lucretius in the Renaissance_ )2014).

Among the virtual panaels which these guests will be speaking on are:
Inclusive Design For the Future
Monstrous Façade: Disability and Disfigurement as a Villainous Trope
Creating Inclusive Cons
and they will also have Kaffeeklatsches and readings.

In addition, media studies and fan studies scholar
Henry Jenkins
https://henryjenkins.org/ (
and my Dumbledore! er, former head of the media studies program at MIT), will be leading this workshop: Civic Imagination Workshop
Join this hands-on workshop for social change, that teaches attendees how to borrow principles from areas of fandom and apply them to real-world activities to help generate lasting, positive change. The workshop will apply ideas from activities such as speculative worldbuilding and fan fiction writing.

The convention schedule is available online in two forms, interactive and non-interactive
https://boskone.org/program/schedule/

The virtual membership rate is $25, and the in-person adult membership is $70. Convention rates are good through February 20, 2022.
You can buy a membership here
https://boskone.org/registration/buy-a-membership/

Current Mood: excited
Current Location: aerye
Current Music: Troublemaker, Vandoliers

From this week's Top Tech Tidbits newsletter:

The popular open-source office suite, LibreOffice, will support two constructed (made-up) languages from early February with the launch of LibreOffice 7.3. The two languages are Star Trek's Klingon — the language of the Klingons, and Interslavic, a language that's supposed to bridge the language gap between Slavic languages such as Russian and Polish
https://www.neowin.net/news/libreoffice-73-will-ship-with-support-for-two-made-up-languages-klingon-and-interslavic/

To read the rest of this week's newsletter, or to subscribe, go to
https://toptechtidbits.com/

From the announcement email:

Superfest35 is here!
October 15th-17th
Free passes STILL available!

Text reads: Superfest Disability Film Festival. Celebrating 35 years. Get your virtual passes at superfestfilm.com. October 15, 16, 17. Film strips line the top and bottom with various film stills. One features an illustration of a white woman with Down syndrome wearing a multicolor shirt, one features a drawing of a blind Japanese woman, and another features a Black woman dancing in a powerful stretch.

Today is the day! You can now officially begin watching our 2021 line-up of 21 incredible films at any point from now until midnight on Sunday October 17! Once you begin a screening, you will have 72 additional hours to finish so just make sure to sign in by Sunday night.

If you haven't grabbed your passes yet, no worries. There's still plenty of time!

Read on for a reminder of the festival schedule, including our event with Sins Invalid TONIGHT, and we hope you enjoy this year's films!

Get your pass for Superfest now
https://superfest.eventive.org/passes/buy

Superfest On Demand
Watch these at any point from now until midnight on Sunday October 17! Once you begin a screening, you will have 72 additional hours to finish so just make sure to sign in by Sunday night.
• 21 incredible films,
see the lineup here!
http://www.superfestfilm.com/2021-films

Once you've got your pass and you're logged into Eventive....
o To access the films with open captions without audio description, click this link.
https://watch.eventive.org/superfest/play/6139211b7afeba006cbb8c89

o To access the films with open captions and audio description, click this link.
https://watch.eventive.org/superfest/play/613926c24c8923002939ddb5

• An intro from our festival director Cathy Kudlick
https://watch.eventive.org/superfest/play/6142799a78e8251796e285b9/6142697bd017ae0029e7b42d

• Filmmaker panel #1: "The Art of Cinema Audio Description: Beyond Compliance"
https://watch.eventive.org/superfest/play/6142799a78e8251796e285b9/61648556ee06a20045608964

• Filmmaker panel #2: "A Behind-the-Scenes Look at Sign Night and Deaf Filmmaking during COVID-19"
https://watch.eventive.org/superfest/play/6142799a78e8251796e285b9/61562902642a3b005468369b

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Hold on to your seats, I just found out about this: someone made a version of Dracula entirely in ASL. The bad news is that of course it was an experimental 1970s thing and of course it has the expected poor quality, but you can find it on Youtube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Si3cNB33Ui8
or, supposedly, on DVD
https://kingofthewitches.com/products/default-dvd

Kes: I know I'm just a product of the '80s because I just keep seeing bad sf horror movie all over this. Also, I want Crispin Glover to be the voice of Quantum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aogfpsnjHO4

Kes: Another fantastic example of how a technology intended for people with disabilities became a major benefit to teh entire society. Note that this is even a relatively low-cost technology, because it is run by volunteers, and it's using very basic tech to operate.

Meet the man behind Tveeder, the no-frills live TV transcript that became an Australian media hero
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/aug/21/meet-the-man-behind-tveeder-the-no-frills-live-tv-transcript-that-became-an-australian-media-hero

Kes: Apologies for these notes being kind of a formatting mess--I'll be neatening them up and adding to them soon, but wanted to post them before the panel.

"I'm In": Infiltration Techniques for Writers
Panel description: 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.

After spending the past two months reading books and watching movies about hackers, thieves, con artists, etc., I've come to the conclusion that there are very few books or movies which will provide any useful information regarding how to pick a lock, hack a computer system, or pull off the perfect con. The reason for this is that, like any art, you are required to put in hours and hours of research and repetitive practice, which is mind-numbingly boring to anyone viewing it from the outside, and when you actually do something really impressive, it is usually indetectable to anyone other than another expert. In addition, most people find the highly technical details of hacking, lockpicking, and the logistics of planning a heist become boring after the first five minutes, even after you have translated the specialized language, be it slang, cant, or technical jargon, into plain language.

If you want to test this statement, go and try reading Neal Stephenson's novel
_Cryptonomicon_, in which the author includes a lot of information and history about cryptography. I can't tell you much about it myself because the novel is over eleven hundred pages long, and I kept falling asleep, so I can't speak as to whether the novel works on a narrative level, though many of my programmer friends have praised it highly for its technical content.

However, there are many hackers, thieves, social engineers, and former covert ops people who offer advice on how to commit crimes, or how to defend yourself against having these crimes committed against you, and many of these people have posted articles and videoes on the Internet. So after discussing my few fictional recommendations, this article will mostly be dedicated to discussing nonfictional resources for learning how to be good at, as Squirrel Girl would say, criming.

This is the part where I insert a statement declaring that I neither condone nor encourage the committing of any of the illegal acts described in this document, and that this article is provided strictly as an infomational resource for writers and for the purposes of entertainment.

If you're only going to watch one TV show, I recommend Leverage (2008-2012) and the sequel Leverage: Redemption (2021). It's witty, upbeat, and has strong female and black characters.

It's also reminiscent of the much earlier movie Sneakers (Dir. Phil Alden Robinson, 1992), which featured a similar team of hackers, criminals, and outcasts, and which was recently rereleased on Blue Ray with new commentary tracks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXWdj5-CTjI , a personal favorite of mine because it includes a blind hacker character based on a real-life blind hacker named Whistler. Sneakers introduced the idea of the "red team," a group of hacers who are hired to penetrate a company or agency's security in order to expose vulnerabilities.
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Alexx just read me
this great tweet by Lara B. Sharp,
https://www.facebook.com/lara.bee.sharp/posts/10101087016372330
describing how she responded to a man's sexist comment in a parking lot by flashing him her tit, the one with the big biopsy scar on it, which resulted in a whole battle of wills thing, which is literally hysterically funny.

And I thought, hey! I have this trickster character in Sentinels of Freedom named Fizzy Girl who fights crime through non-violent means, and being able to reduce a criminal to sputtering impotent rage by flashing her tit would definitely be in her bailiwick, so I asked Alexx if it would be possible to add that action, and he said no. So then I asked if we could ask the programmers to add it, and he said "Probably not," which I think is totally sexist.

Then I had this thought of adding that whenever Fizzy Girl flashed her tits, Mardi Gras beads would fall from the sky, and evil doers would be compelled to chase after them, but maybe that's a little over the top?

It's the origin story of Comic-Con itself, and I'm currently listening to it on my Alexa

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/comic-con-begins-origin-stories-san-diego-comic-con/id1540625779

Lots of science fiction in this list, including Victor LaValle's _Ballad of Black Tom_, also movies based on books by N. K. Jemisin and Octavia Butler
https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/article/books-becoming-tv-and-streaming-series/

I just deleted my Facebook account. Facebook has never been as accessible as I thought it should be, and it's always been a pain in the ass to use. In addition, this recent deal to sell advertising to Oculis so it appears on people XR headsets is really creepy: seriously, sighted people, advertisers are not going to be happy until they can feed advertising to you in your sleep.

I signed up for many of these social media accounts when I was in the media studies program at MIT, when social media seemed all shiny and new and full of promise, but the accessibility hasn't improved all that much since then, while the privacy and security risks have increased exponentially, especially over the past year. It's past time to sign off.

My next step is to delete my Twitter account.

So don't panic: I'm not dead, I'm just not on Facebook or Twitter anymore.

Thanks to Facebook, life has begun to imitate science fiction (but don't worry: I have an in with the secret sisterhood of blind ninjas who are going to save us all in reel three, and one of them is Lucy Lu's blind baby sister)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2021/07/04/facebook-just-gave-1-million-oculus-users-a-reason-to-leave/?ss=cybersecurity&sh=396c7bfa76f5