Tootfinder

So about that discomfort...
In the end, we have basically "hooray, national park declaration will protect the endangered species, whose traditional guardians, effectively extinct, will move into a new formal structure."
Celeste isn't Indigenous-coded, but this is *way* to close to several layers of colonialist myth that we have in America. The real story of our national parks, after all, is that we genocided the original inhabitants and forced them to move out of the parks, including banning culturally-important religious ceremonies at sacred sites in parks like Yosemite (in a country that's supposed to be very serious about freedom of religion...). Then we mostly erased those tribes from officially-taught history, pretending that they had tragically disappeared (they're still around; I could probably go look up their websites right now if I wanted to), and said "look at the majesty of this *wild*, *untamed*, *remote* wilderness. Isn't its completely *natural* beauty, untouched by humans, so wonderful?" Then just like the original tribes we do a bunch of human intervention to maintain the ecosystems there, and start charging camping and parking fees to support that work.
Yeah, it's a really fucked-up history.
So that's why it bothers me that the book ends with this as a positive resolution. In the book, the dragons' guardians are actually extinct, down to just Celeste. The prophecy-bending pretty much ensures that they won't actually make a comeback as a culture... But in real life, the descendants of the tribes that were forced out of Yellowstone, Yosemite, and other national parks are still around. The portrayal of genocides of indigenous peoples as completed is actually one big part of the colonialist myth: if they're all dead already, it might be tragic, but it's history, and there's no reason to give the land back or pay reparations or anything like that (Hollow Knight is sadly another extremely popular example of this myth-making). Then there's the idea that humans and nature are separable, the idea that the colonizers are trustworthy stewards of the land they stole, etc. When you set these things up to be true in your fictional world, you're helping acclimate readers to the idea that they're true in the real world, and that's bad.
I don't think that Matrin necessarily did this with malice: she's probably just reflecting back the myths she was taught. Special order tasked with sacred duty now almost extinct? Great way to give a character a tragic backstory and some powerful motivations, right? Etc.
TL;DR: I wish Martin had been as conscious of and clever in undermining colonialist myths as she was in dealing with standard fantasy racism.

Computers used to be fun. I used to use Windows 9x, and it was unstable as hell, and you kept having to lean over backwards to get things to work. Then I used bleeding edge Linux, and at some point I've ended up running pure framebuffer tty for months because X11 was broken. But despite all the breakage (or maybe even because of it), it was fun. It was fun because random accidental breakage was the worst you could expect.
Nowadays, accidental breakage is rare. Things are relatively stable. However, every step of the way you have to watch out for bad actors. No, not criminals, they are rare. Evil corporations who are looking at every opportunity to fuck you up. Using computer is no longer fun, it's no longer a tool that helps you, and it's no longer your choice. You are forced to use it, and if you don't want to be hurt every step of the way, you have to spend all the effort on fighting back. And you're fucked up anyway, because even if you manage, your family and all the people around you won't care and will let their devices, their computers and their smartphones fuck you up.
I've started using FLOSS so many years ago, for the trivial reason that I didn't want to pay for software. I stayed because I enjoyed doing it. And I wanted to make a difference, I wanted to contribute positively to the world. Even if in a little way, but I wanted to be able to say that as much harm I've done to the planet, there's at least something positive to balance it out.
But nowadays I hate FLOSS. It's been overrun by the worst people in the world. The people who aren't happy with just fucking you up. They want everyone to keep fucking everyone up. It's the kind of horror where whatever you do, it turns out you're causing harm.
I don't trust my #Gentoo #packaging work anymore. So much of the software I touch turns out to be #slop. When I file a pull request, I'm worried it will trigger #LLM reviews. When I file a bug, I'm worried it will trigger LLM responses. And today, I've learned that my old bug report to a #NoAI project resulted in a dozen slop pull requests already. Whatever you do, #AI folks smile and tell you "see, you fucked up the world even more after all".
Honestly, I don't know what to do. I hate all of this so much. But even if I managed to figure out something else to do for a living, I can't escape computers. And if I stop doing them, if I stop fighting them, I will only end up being fucked up more.
#NoLLM #AI #FreeSoftware

Just finished "A Psalm for the Wild-Built" by Becky Chambers. Overall it's good but I also have some Thoughts.
First, it was very pleasant to finally read some non-trite utopian solarpunk after having read stuff like Octavia Butler recently. Both hope and despair can be poisonous on their own IMO, so getting some balance in is nice. It's definitely a very valuable thing to be able to lay out an actually desirable and in many ways imaginable future given our grim present. Chambers is no LeGuin though. I'll probably be reading more of her work and maybe she fleshes out these ideas elsewhere, but at least in this book there is no focus on either how the transition to a better society could happen nor on how the better society holds up in the face of adverse events and inclinations. Compare LeGuin's "The Dispossessed" or N. K. Jemisin's short story "The Ones Who Stay and Fight" and it feels like there's something important missing from Chambers' portrait of a future society. Of course, maybe the point is to make a cozy book, in which case fine, there's certainly a place for such things, and I can look for deeper inspiration elsewhere.
The second big thought I had was that Chambers' worldview seems not well-informed by certain indigenous perspectives, and this creates some contradictions. For example, (minor spoilers) when Dex enters the wilderness there's a whole bit about understanding humankind's place in nature and how human settlements are what we're used to but they're only a brief interruption of the vast untouched wilderness. Along the same lines, much of the world is intentionally left untouched by humans as a way to keep it pristine and natural. Later however, a character makes the point that humans *are* animals. The indigenous perspective that I appreciate would agree with that, and would further question the value in distinguishing between human influence on ecosystems and influences that others have. More sharply, one might observe that there's a bigger difference between how different kinds of humans relate to and influence their environments than between how less-disruptive humans and various animals do the same: the strip-mine-operator vs. migrant tribesperson impact difference is probably much greater than the migrant tribesperson vs. beaver gap, for example. Rather than talking about limiting human disruption, then, as if all human-environment interactions are disruptive and must be minimized, we could/should be talking about how to create human societies that have beneficial relationships with their environments and acknowledging that we actually have many positive examples of that, both historical and contemporary. Chambers' utopia is a "humans dominate nature but restrain themselves so that their disruptions are minimal and thus nature can thrive" vision, but what I'd even more like to see would be a "humans study old ways and make new ones so that they can interact positively with ecosystems again" vision, including some of "here are the places that sometimes breaks down but also the patterns and institutions that ensure repair of those breakdowns and thus long-term sustainability."
Final big thought: Chambers' utopia is too homogenous for my tastes. Of course it's hard enough and valuable work dreaming up and sharing any utopia and Chambers' transcends triteness in a number of ways, so this criticism is a bit rude. But the single shared religion, lack of mention of conflicts around shared decisions, especially historical society-defining ones, and nagging questions like "what about the people indigenous to the now-uninhabited lands?" and "what about the indigenous peoples who weren't part of the factory-building societies?" leave me wishing for more nuance in this direction.
All in all: a good book, and I'm criticizing out of a place of appreciation, not scorn. I've got there sequel out from the library as well and will probably detour to a few other books but get to it pretty soon.
Sadly I don't remember who, but I got this one because of a recommendation on here, so thanks if you're someone who recommended it!
#AmReading #ReadingNow #Bookstodon