I Have No Facebook and I Must Scream

One woman's attempts to live in an Internet full of money and angry people

[ragtailedfox]

If you've found yourself here somehow I don't use this Tumblr any more. But it's my primary so I can't delete it. I'm over here now: https://www.tumblr.com/blog/firefurfox

[therealrobinhobb-deactivated202]

Events at Waterstones get you closer to the books and authors you admire most. Find information and tickets about An Evening with Robin Hobb today.

[ragtailedfox]

Monday 1st May, Manchester Deansgate Waterstones.

Seriously, like, wild horses, earthquake, floods, even a personal appearance by Donald Trump couldn’t keep me away.

[ragtailedfox]

The Skill and the Wit

I’ve been wondering just how much of this Robin planned.

The Skill is a Farseer magic.  It is a magic of court intrigues, of assassinations, of politics, of castles, of big cities, and the complex human societies cities create.  It conveys thought, emotion, memory.  It is a magic of all things human.  Even it’s name–a skill is something someone may or may not have a talent for, but it is something that must be learned, that must be practised.  And you only have the time to learn and practice when someone else makes your clothes, makes your food, makes your bed.

The Wit, the Old Blood, is an animal magic.  Fitz talks of how the Wit connects him to the web of life, the spark of life that exits in all living things, from people to animals to trees.  It’s a magic of the forests Nighteyes and Fitz hike through on their way to Tradeford, of the cabin Black Rolf shares with Holly hidden deep in the woods, of the wolfish now and animal Fitz’s mind lives in.  Even its names, the Wit and the Old Blood, are things we are born with, which are innate.  You can not change your blood, and Oscar Wild’s are born rather than made.

Look at those who choose to use the Skill to prolong their lives:  Chade; maybe Thick.  People of the court, of civilisation, of intrigues.  Chade is the embodiment of Farseer court intrigues, of a high civilisation where he can devote all his time to intrigue because his food, his fire, his clothes, his home is provided by others.  And those who adamantly refuse it?  Nighteyes, and Molly.  Both people of the wild, of nature, of hunting your own food and cleaning your own room even when you have servants to do it for you.

The Skill is a magic of civilisation, and the Wit of nature.

Is that why the Wit is so despised in the Six Duchies?  Is it a reflection of our own society’s biophobia, our obsessive need to sterilise and fence in, our social revulsion at ageing and dying, at bodily functions?  When someone asks if you’d rather be Skilled or Witted, are the asking if you’d rather be a scientist or a survivalist?

And Fitz, a creature of both civilisation and the wild, has both magics.

Damn.  I wish I had someone to talk to about this Fitz stuff that goes on in my head.  

[ragtailedfox]

For my birthday my partner and I went to Sherwood Forest and walked.  On the first day we went for a walk that started in Old Ollerton, and I saw a fox’s den just the other side of the fence.  It’s the first fox’s den I’ve ever seen.  It was very special.

[ragtailedfox]

"Fitz," Kettricken said quietly. Her voice was suddenly that of a friend, not the Queen.  "I speak to you as a woman, to tell you that although you bear scars, you are far from the grotesque you seem to believe yourself.  You are, still, a comely youth, in ways that have nothing to do with your face.  And were my heart not full of my Lord Verity, I would not disdain you."  She reached out a hand and ran cool fingers down the old split down my cheek, as if her touch could erase it.

Assassin’s Quest, Kettricken speaking to Fitz in the tent, deep in the mountains on the road to find Verity.

“Fitz.  If I wasn’t so in love with Verity then so help me god I’d do you right here, right now, and I wouldn’t even care who walked in.” 

*gets up and leaves the tent while she still can*

[canalsobemoe]

Inktober 21! My contributions to fandom are 100% serious always, at all times. Forever.

[ragtailedfox]

Literally true.  

[ragtailedfox]

I’ve just finished re-reading Royal Assassin.  In truth, I spend most of it with my mental face in my mental hands groaning with my mental voice, “ffs, Fitz.  Listen!  Listen to Molly.  Listen to her!  Listen to Nighteyes!  Listen to Chade!  To Burrich!  To Verity! Fucking listen to someone!”  He didn’t, and it didn’t end well for him.

At the beginning of Assassin’s Quest, Chade says:

“Look back over the last year:  every time I turned about, here was Fitz, railing at the world, in the middle of a fist fight, in the midst of battle, wrapped up in bandaging, drunk as a fisherman, or limp as a string and mewling for elfbark.”

And, well, that’s not wrong.  But here’s the thing.

Fitz is, really, a mostly-sedate pack animal with a huge sense of empathy (having both the Wit and the Skill will do that to you).  He never enjoyed killing.  He did it because of Chade, and Shrewd.  He cared about them and wanted to make them happy.  And that’s the way his world worked--Chade, Burrich, Shrewd, they were his pack and they looked after each other.  

And then Regal happened.  Regal deliberately and specifically set out to murder Fitz.  You just... don’t do that.  So Fitz has two options:  remove himself; or remove Regal.  He can’t do the former because all the people he cares about are here.  And not only can he not do the latter, but Shrewd makes him stay loyal to Regal. 

So Fitz does the only thing he can do.  He tries to find another way out.  He’s like Nighteyes locked in the cage and all the people who should be letting him out are keeping him there.  So he rattles and growls and shouts and throws himself against the bars.  And, less metaphorically, he looks for a good way to die.

[fionacreates]

FitzChivalry Farseer

I always saw Fitz as the kind of character who always looks a little like he’s been dragged through a hedge backwards, even if he’s trying to look neat. I’m experimenting and starting to develop some kind of visual language I want to use when working in Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings.  (Same as I’ve done with Garth Nix’s Abhorsen series) Making use of the Farseer Royal Buck design I sketched up the other day.

[ragtailedfox]

The whitewashing of FitzChivalry Farseer bugs the hell out of me.  From book covers to people talking about which actor they’d want to play him.  In the Farseer trilogy there’s dozens of references to the Farseer blood being dark skinned.  So it does my heart so good to come onto Tumblr and find many, many pictures of a dark-skinned Fitz.

[ragtailedfox]

[ragtailedfox]

In loyalty to their kind They cannot tolerate our minds. In loyalty to our kind We cannot tolerate their obstruction! Life is change. How it differs from the rocks. I've seen their ways too often for my liking.

Crown of Creation (song and album), Jefferson Airplane, 1968

When Grace Slick sang that, the 60′s psychedelic counter-culture was in open war with mainstream culture, and mainstream culture was fighting back with every weapon it had.  When Slick sings, “Soon you'll attain the stability you strive for / In the only way that it's granted: / In a place among the fossils of our time” it’s a promise and a threat.

The sentiment comes form John Wyndham’s, ‘The Chrysalids’.  During the same speech, the character says,

“Sometime there will come a day when we ourselves shall have to give place to a new thing. Very certainly we shall struggle against the inevitable just as these remnants of the Old People do. We shall strive with all our strength to grind it back into the earth from which it is emerging, for treachery to one's own species must always seem a crime."

I woke up thinking about it the morning.  It seems very much to me that progressive culture is rising up and conservative culture is trying to grind it back down into the earth it’s blooming from. And it’s the generation of 60′s counter-culture that’s now the conservatives.  

Both sides are fighting for survival.  Progressive culture is the product of a civilisation that allows its people a lot of free time to think and plan and organise and communicate and travel (there’s a reason why it exploded into being in Europe at the same time the industrial revolution did), and our civilisation can’t sustain that for much longer.   I’d like the culture that allows me to be a gender-queer trans-species fiction-loving little fuck up to win, but I no longer think it’s inevitable.  I do, though, quite selfishly hope it survives for long enough that I can work out who I am and what I’m meant to be doing with my time on Earth.

[thedragonreviews]

The skies of this world were always meant to have dragons. When they are not there, humans miss them. Some never think of them, of course. But some children, from the time they are small, they look up at a blue summer sky and watch for something that never comes. Because they know

The Fool, The Golden Fool by Robin Hobb, pg 628 (via iamalsostarrmarked)

I’ve had a day of waiting for dragons that will never come today.  There is something missing in this world, and sometimes it threatens to break me.  I feel like I’m in a world that’s never known sight but I can remember what it feels like to see.

[ragtailedfox]

Over 1.8 million people signed a petition to stop Trump’s state visit to the UK.  This is after thousands took to the streets in protest the day after he was sworn into office.  And today the UK government “look forward to welcoming President Trump once dates and arrangements are finalised” and they believe “the President of the United States should be extended the full courtesy of a State Visit.”  Because “HM Government recognises the strong views expressed by the many signatories of this petition, but does not support this petition.”

It’s not a surprise.  Not because HM Government has fought tooth and nail to stop the elected UK Parliament having any kind of say what-so-ever over Brexit by using the Royal Prerogative to leave the EU with no Parliamentary vote, input, scrutiny, or input.

Although it is for the same reason.  Government can only function if it has the power to impose its will on the people it governs.  Queen May has already extended the invitation to Trump.  Demands to rescind it are a direct challenge to the government’s power. 

Only the government can steal.  Only the government can murder.  Only the government can threaten.  The job of the police is to ensure that private citizens can’t impose their will on others--protecting other private citizens from having will imposed upon them is a convenient side-effect.  That’s the government’s monopoly on violence.  Only the government can use violence to impose its will.

This is no different.  This is the government exorcising its monopoly on violence to impose its will.  This is the basis of government.

We can only hope people remember this in three years time when they call an election.  The only power we have is to choose a dictator that’s to our liking every five years.

[ragtailedfox]

[ragtailedfox]

The Internet’s Made of Money and Anger.  I Miss the Kittens.

I suppose I can blame Trump.  The US used to be a place of aspirations, somewhere all the cool stuff happened.  Now it’s another silly Second World country, like Russia or some former colony where obnoxious, horrific shit happens and I just kind of shrug my shoulders because they’re Somewhere Else.  Nonsensical travel ban?  Sure.  Appoint a conspiracy-theory far-right blogger as your chief adviser?  Not surprised.  Turn your currency into a base-9 system because 9 is your favourite number?  Yeah, okay.  But it’s Trump that chased me off Facebook.  

I can’t claim to have been an early-adopter of the Internet, but I’ll claim to be a first-wave adopter.  Back in the mid-to-late-nineties when I had to unplug the family phone and plug in the modem.  When mobile phones had to have carry handles and car phones were a thing.  I may never have been on UseNet but I was on Geocities, Angelfire, MySpace, Yahoo groups, Elfwood.  I spent many hours at the turn of the century in the university computer labs roleplaying in Yahoo chat rooms when I should have been writing essays.  The noughties were when I felt at home online.  Back when the Internet was made of cats and we all chanted badger badger badger badger badger badger badger badger.  I loled at Matrix and LotR memes before I knew the word ‘meme’.  And when those films were still out at the cinema.

See, I’ve always been a bit... weird.  You say tomato and I say did you know a tomatoes are actually a fruit and, technically, people are fruits too because our seeds are on the inside under our fleshy outers.  And back in the noughties the Internet was full of people like me.  I could say stuff like that.  I didn’t have to hide, like I did in meatspace.  It was good.

And then all then websites started floating themselves on the stockmarket.  And all the meatspace people I was hiding from started taking the ‘net seriously.  And advertisers started to follow me from website to website to website.

And then, one day, I was scrolling through Facebook and all my newsfeed was full of fake news and people getting angry about fake news and petitions to stop Trump... well, being Trump, and people shouting about why being Trump was a bad thing and I realised that my playground had turned into a battleground.  And on one side there was me and my friends in my newsfeed, and on the other side were the rich, angry, white people and global-super-mega-corps and their billions and trillions of dollars.   Bows and arrows against the lightning.  And advertisers sucking the life out of it all like midges who don’t care what side they suck their blood from but inescapable, utterly inescapable. 

So I mothballed my Facebook and my Twitter and stared blankly at my computer screen, trying to remember just what in the hell this Internet thing was for without them.  

That was a couple of weeks ago.   And all the stuff I want to post to Facebook has been backing up in my brain and I decided to start another Wordpress blog to unblock it.  And then I thought, why do that when I haven’t become alienated from tumblr yet?