(Image from Bill T)

So, as most of us expected, Amazon says that the stripping of ranking from LGTBQ materials that I screamed about in my last post was a glitch. I call bullshit. If it were a glitch, then the authors who had complained to Amazon as far back as February about having lost their rankings would not have all along been treated to responses explaining that their materials had been classified as adult and stripped of ranking.

Meta Writer on LiveJournal has begun compiling a list of de-ranked books, the “strip-list” as I like to call it, and I think maybe there is something going on over on Twitter as well, but I draw the line of my technogeekery at Twitter, so I don’t know. What I do know is that Heather has Two Mommies is on that list. Heather has Two Mommies!?! In what fucking universe?

Nicola Griffith’s Always was reported to be stripped of rank, too, but I checked just now and it appears to be ranked in Kindle sales, although not in Books. Oh, proprietary software, that’s *another* rant…but I’ll save it for another day. The point is, Griffith, one of my favourite authors, as I believe I have mentioned before, doesn’t write smut. Not that I would mind if she did; I seem to recall complaining that there wasn’t enough sex for me in Slow River. But I digress.

The point is that books like these, children’s books and YA novels and mysteries and sci-fi adventures and historical documents and canonical works and scholarly texts and and and and…are being knocked off of the front page of any search. If I search for Heather has Two Mommies, it doesn’t show up until much further down the page. Meanwhile, Playboy’s top ten moments in whack-off history is doing just fine. The number one hit for a search on the word “homosexuality” is A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality, followed by a slew of books on “healing” gayness.

Now that really is some kind of glitch.

Jane at Dear Author has provided not only an excellent concise breakdown of the events so far, but also a phone number, email address and even a template for what you may like to write to the folks at Amazon to make your voice heard. Building on that template, I sent them the following:

Dear Amazon,

It has come to my attention that you are de-ranking books, supposedly on the basis of “adult content.” It appears that by Amazon standards “adult content” is defined as books that have anything at all to do with LGBTQ characters, authors, issues, or references, with some general erotica being roped in, as well. In the meantime, however, books on the illegal, inhumane, and horrifyingly violent sport of dog fighting remain ranked and appear on a first page search under “dog fighting”: http://bit.ly/18l70B. Further, a search under “playboy” yields as the first return “Playboy: Wet and Wild Complete Collection,” followed by “Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds,” and so on. At what point did “adult content” exclude nude women and dogs killing other dogs for sport? Meanwhile, “Heather Has Two Mommies” is stripped of its rank. By what criteria is this groundbreaking children’s book considered “adult content”?

I have seen the claims published in “Publisher’s Weekly” and the Associated Press about a glitch in the system causing this, but I am not convinced. Authors who complained about the lost rankings to their books have been receiving the response that their materials have been classsified as “adult” for over a month. This has been an ongoing and sneaky obliteration of the availability of LGTBQ materials. The only “glitch” here is hatred and the misconception that LGTBQ literature is obscene.

This is nothing short of discrimination; this is nothing short of censorship. This is nothing a business that claims commercial integrity at even the most basic level would do. Consequently, as a longtime Amazon customer, I look forward to an immediate reversal of this ridiculous policy. Otherwise, I will purchase elsewhere and encourage everyone else I know to do the same.

Sincerely,

stark

I already purchase elsewhere—I used to work in an indie bookstore and am devastated by the state of the publishing and bookselling industries—but I guess I have used them from time to time, very grudgingly. No longer. Stick it to ‘em.

Click on this:
Amazon Rank

Thank you. Now that you have contributed to that Google-bomb, I’ll explain why Amazon is a hot mess of anti-literate nonsense. As Smart Bitches, Trashy Books reports, the behemoth online retailer has begun

stripping the sales figures and accompanying rankings from GLBTQ books, erotica, and romance novels, particularly those with what they term “adult content.”

This is absolutely ridiculous. Not only are most books on the “strip-list” anything but “adult” in content, but an inordinate amount of what could be called “adult” books featuring content of the heterosexual persuasion have not been included. The proliferation of big box stores and internet bookselling has already decimated the numbers and successes of marginalised writers, and this just works to annihilate us entirely. It’s messed up and I for one won’t stand for it.

I’m deleting my profile with Amazon, one I avoided using for most things anyway, as I have long been a supporter and even a rank and file member of the independent bookselling and publishing industries. Furthermore I encourage anyone who wants to support the continued publication of LGTBQ books, or anyone who just doesn’t want to live with an economy of corporate censorship, to sign the online petition that is circulating. And if you want, follow the instructions on Smart Bitches and Google-bomb those shitheads. Do it! You’ll feel better.

And if you feel like you can’t live without internet book buying, try Powell’s, Indie Bound, a good Canadian boookseller, or even see one of the websites of your local bookstores. Do the industry a favour and buy local!

A couple of months ago I pledged to blog for Ada Lovelace Day, an initiative put forth by Suw Charman-Anderson, digital rights activist, journalist and blogger. The initiative seeks to challenge the notion that women are absent from science by shedding light on women who have excelled in science.

I have chosen to look at some of the achievements and theories of award-winning physicist and metallurgist Ursula Franklin, who has had a formative influence on how I see the world around me. I first read The Real World of Technology when I was 19, taking a class on the anthropology of technology, a course that I had only added to my schedule to fulfill a science requirement for my undergraduate arts degree. The course ended up being enlightening and transforming, mainly thanks to Dr. Franklin.

To go into all of Franklin’s achievements and ideas would require a textbook rather than a blog post, so I will focus only on two areas: her assertion that technology is a practice rather than an accumulation of objects and her theories on a feminist scientific method.

Technology as Practice

In The Real World of Technology, Franklin says:

Looking at technology as practice, indeed as formalized practice, has some quite interesting consequences. One is that it links technology directly to culture, because culture, after all, is a set of socially accepted practices and values. Well laid down and agreed upon practices also define the practitioners as a group of people who have something in common because of the way they are doing things. . . .I think it is important to realize that technology defined as practice shows us the deep cultural link of technology, and it saves us from thinking that technology is the icing on the cake. Technology is part of the cake itself. (P. 15 - 17)

To say that technology is a practice recognizes the system of interactions that make up technology. This system includes not only the ‘hard science’ and formal processes that leads to the creation of a technological innovation, but the cultural and social processes that are involved as well. She attests that the technology we create and the society in which it is created are inextricably intertwined. Thus much of the way that technology is practiced reflects existing norms, privileges, and oppressions dominating the greater society.

Franklin also distinguishes between what she calls “Holistic” and “Prescriptive” technologies, the former being those practices most often associated with the artisan who is involved with all aspects of the technology’s creation from beginning to end, and the latter comprising those technologies characterized by ancient Chinese bronze-casting and later by the Industrial Revolution, dividing labour into specialized bits and creating products that are uniform.

When work is organized into a series of separately executable steps, the control over the work moves [from the artisan] to the organizer, the boss or the manager. The process itself has to be prescribed with sufficient precision to make each step fit into the preceding and the following steps. Only in that manner can the final product be satisfactory… Prescriptive technologies constitute a major social invention. in political terms, prescriptive technologies are designs for compliance. When working within such designs, a workforce becomes acculturated into a milieu in which external control and internal compliance are seen as normal and necessary. (P. 23)

She argues that the prescriptive technological process applies in our society to governing, education and economics in addition to the production of materials. While the rise of prescriptive technological practice has brought about many important innovations and contributed to a rise in living standards (for some), it has also fostered a social environment more complicit, more susceptible to conformity and less resistant to social programming.

Feminist Scientific Method

Looking at technology as practice entails recognizing science as more than an objective, formal discipline free of cultural assumptions that might cloud the results of a given study. Beyond looking at how objectivity is compromised by the subjectivity of a scientific practitioner, Franklin points to the ways that a discipline becomes the realm of one group over another through a series of social interactions and traditions:

When certain technologies and tools are predominantly used by men, maleness becomes part of the definition of those technologies. It is for these deep-rooted reasons that it is so very difficult for women to enter what are now called “non-traditional” jobs. If engineers are male and maleness is part of engineering, then it’s tough for men to accept women into the profession… And so year after year, engineering faculties go through initiation procedures that are crude, sexist, and obscene in order to establish that the profession is male, even if some of the practitioners are female. (P. 16)

In addition to looking at how practices become gendered, Franklin emphasizes the need for experience to influence the scientific method.

Today scientific constructs have become the model of describing reality rather than one of the ways of describing life around us. . . . Because the scientific method separates knowledge from experience, it may be necessary in case of discrepancies to question the scientific results… rather than to question and discount the experience. It should be experience that leads to a modification of knowledge, rather than abstract knowledge forcing people to perceive their experience as being unreal or wrong. (P. 39 - 40)

Franklin argues that bringing experience into the scientific method would open up knowledge to new discoveries as new kinds of questions are asked. Women, she has argued, ask different questions and discover new knowledge that has otherwise been largely ignored or overlooked.

The great contribution of women to technology lies precisely in their potential to change the technostructures by understanding, critiquing, and changing the very parameters that have kept women away from technology. Happily, I am beginning to see small beginnings of such structural changes… However, it’s barely a start. (P. 104)

Over ten years later, Franklin notes that women who challenge the mainstream of scientific study by challenging objectivity with experiential questioning are still marginalized within their areas of study. But she hasn’t stopped transforming the world of technology around her or encouraging other women to do so in turn.

Franklin has been named a Companion of the Order of Canada, awarded a slew of prestigious honours, from the Governor General’s Award to the U.N.’s Pearson Medal of Peace as well as numerous honourary doctoral degrees, and has even had a high school named after her. She has inspired generations of women to bring their experiences to the world of technology and has herself transformed the way we think about technology with her ideas and practices.

Work Cited: Franklin, Ursula. The Real World of Technology. Concord, Ontario: House of Ananasi P., 1990.

New Old Project…

So I have been engaged in another project that has kept me a bit busy away from this blog. It is a project I had undertaken before, a few years ago, but lately some cracks in the sustained stability of the project forced me to re-evaluate its success; after some deliberation and planning I have decided to do it all over again. Any interested parties can read all about it on the project blog.

That’s right, I am out. I fell off the wagon and I am climbing back on. It’s not as hard this time as it was the last.

I got lots of stuff done today. The last week or so has been stressful as some major changes went down at the headquarters of my main employer. Some of these changes I had expected—just a feeling on the matter, some not at all. Specifically, a lot of people who had jobs a week ago no longer do. I was not one of those cut…yet. However, I have yet to be given a real assignment either, so my workload has been unnervingly light. Considering the magnitude of upheaval and disgruntlement I have heard about through the freelancer grapevine, I am feeling pretty nervous. I’m just keeping my head down and my mouth shut and hoping for the best.

In the meantime, I have looked into other work. For now I want to look at part-time work to supplement the work I am already doing, as I really do enjoy my current job. However, there were some full-time opportunities I saw that I am exploring as well.

So I have spent my last couple of weeks making plans and preparations, updating my CV, bulking up the website, adding new design and brushing up on my html and CSS skills. Time to get ready, folks; a big change is a-brewin’. Today was no exception. I accomplished quite a lot:

• I worked on the scraps of an assignment I was trying to make last until a new batch of assignments comes up.
• I wrote a blog post for Shameless.
• I applied for two jobs.
• I requested an advance copy of a YA novel to review for the Shameless blog.
• I scouted out some internship and volunteer opportunities of interest.
• I updated my resume. Again.
• I updated my reference list.

I like a good list. Lists of things accomplished make me feel productive, like maybe the anxiety that nibbles quietly at the edge of my stomach will sate its hunger and go to sleep for awhile.

I have been working hard on making this website look like something not created by a five year old in 1996 and I think it is finally beginning to shape up. For months I haven’t touched it, having been busy with work and daunted by the task of teaching myself CSS, but finally I got down to it. Call it a New Year’s Resolution or something. I still have more work to do, but at least the main pages are looking decent.

The splash page hasn’t changed:

The pages linked from the splash page, however, used to look like crap. I had added some basic content as placeholders for the links with the intention of getting back and beefing those pages up, but then I let them sit and fester. The thought of directing anyone I knew or wanted to know to the site was giving me agita.

Anyway, finally I have edited those pages. The CSS wasn’t that difficult after all once I got into it; one decent stylesheet can go a long way. So I have now updated my ABOUT page and linked CV, my WRITING and IMAGES pages and my LINKS.

I would still like to add some buttons to navigate easily between the pages. I plan to use the same graphic as is on the splash page, in reduced size, for the buttons, much the same way Michelle has done with hers, except perhaps mine will be on the top rather than along the sidebar. We’ll see how that looks and go from there.

I also want to add a few media pages for my Images section, linking to a few short videos with thumbnails rather than having all of the video on the Images page itself. And I need to tinker with the photography section, rejuvenating the Holga page I have thus far created and perhaps adding a few other media pages to that as well. So those parts are still in the works.

Thus far I am pretty pleased with the progress and look forward to working more on it and learning more about design as I go! Fun stuff.

I started my winter baking last night. By “started my winter baking” I make myself sound like a traditionalist, but really I mean I made the first batch of the awesomest cookies in the world and I know I will eat them all soon enough that more will have to be made in the coming weeks. Girl’s gotta find new and tasty ways to warm up the apartment during these cold nights, I say. So if anyone is looking for something warm and delectable to sweeten up the holiday, I thought I would share with you all my absolute favourite cookie recipe ever (courtesy of my mom, but with some of my adjustments):

Ginger Molasses Cookies:

1 Cup Butter or Margarine
2 C Sugar (I use 1 C white, 1 C brown, not too firmly packed)
2 eggs beaten
1/2 C molasses
4 C unbleached flour
2 tsp baking soda
Shakes of salt
2 tsp cinnamon
1 tsp cloves
1 1/2 tsp ginger
1/2 tsp nutmeg
1 C raisins (optional)

1. Preheat oven to 350º.
2. Melt butter and place in a large bowl.
3. Add sugar, eggs and molasses to melted butter and combine.
4. Sift flour, baking soda, salt and spices together in a separate bowl.
5. Add dry ingredients to liquid ingredients and stir together until well mixed and moist.
6. If you are going to add raisins, do so now.
7. Cool batter for 2 hours.
8. Form cookie balls about a Tablespoon in size (somewhere between a grape and a golf ball?), roll in sugar and place on lightly greased cookie sheet. If desired, you can press them a bit with a fork.
9. Bake for 8 – 10 minutes, until just browning on the bottom. They will still be very soft when they first come out, but fear not, they are cooked and will set more after five minutes or so of cooling.
10. Dare yourself just to eat one or two.

* Do not double this recipe. For more cookies, repeat from beginning. Also, the recipe makes a good three dozen, so you should be pretty much set.
** You can futz around a bit with the spices as to your liking. I like mine good and gingery.
***These are not ginger snaps, so they never should get hard or crispy, and you won’t be able to make a house out of them. They’re moist, delicious cookies that I can’t stop eating. Yum!

(Click to see enlarged photo)

Today I walked 2 miles and worked out at the gym for an hour. Good for me! Hopefully I can keep that up. Although it was drizzling as I was leaving the gym and walking home, I was struck with a feeling of joy and wonder at how beautiful this city is in the fall: little black squirrels foraging around in veritable blankets of colours, reds, yellows, bronzes, purples, each tree more flamboyant than the last, the rain on brick buildings making the red all the more vibrant, the summer fruit stand open with a last vivid kaleidescope of offerings to spite the approaching cold. It put me in such a good mood I bought some bananas at the stand and hummed away on my way home.

I’m sure I’ll be whining about the cold a week from now, but today I am happy. I am even inspired to go to the gym again tomorrow! Let’s hope the weather lasts a bit longer.

Last night at 2:00 am when we came home from S-chan’s and K-rock’s fantastic Diwali party, one elevator, which earlier in the day had been wildly zipping between floors B1 and 2 without opening the doors even when SuperSteve (thus named for his job title rather than any particular ability to do said job) used the emergency call back key, was shut off completely. A second elevator was stuck on the penthouse and the third, which had been moving when we arrived, came to a halt on floor 24 and stayed there, leaving us to walk the eighteen floors to our apartment with twenty pounds of Diwali leftovers in our arms.

This morning, I heard a dripping and thought that Michelle had not completely turned off the tap in the bathroom sink, as sometimes happens, but nooooooo. The ceiling directly above the toilet, and presumably directly below the toilet above us, ruptured and is leaking all over the place. So we have to use an umbrella to take a piss. I have taped plastic bags to the ceiling hoping to stop some of the water, with the expected result of really not helping at all.

Where are Supers Mira and Steve at this moment in history? Your guess is as good as mine.

GAH!