I had the great fortune of hearing Arin Greenwood read from Your Robot Dog Will Die a few years ago at ICFA (the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts) and the even greater fortune to scoop up an ARC. If there’s a reading equivalent of swallowing a work whole, I did that. I can’t believe I never wrote a review.
Well, I recently bought myself an actual published copy while also buying a gift copy for a friend, and I’m here to say that it’s just as good as I remembered.
I’m not sure how to summarize the book without giving anything away, but it’s the weird, wonderful, heartbreaking, funny story of how humanity copes when they suddenly lose all of their dogs, and the lengths we’ll go to fill this unfillable emotional and social void in our lives.
(Updated to correct spelling and embed Twitter post)
Ravelry is a fiber arts website with over 8 million members worldwide. I’ve been a member of the site for…a while.
Close-up of my Ravelry profile showing I joined on November 13, 2007 as user #37,249.
I’m also one of the forum moderators for a wonderful, silly, kind, and utterly bonkers group on the site. Our group is dedicated to discussing pointless topics such as the logistics of pouring cake batter into the waffle maker, bacon, chocolate, coffee, and dinosaur erotica. One of our forum threads, titled “Fred,” is rounding in on 1,750,000 posts of pure, unadulterated nonsense. Alice would take one look at that place and run the fuck back to the relative sanity of Wonderland. Our group prohibits anything with a point to it, particularly anything about politics or religion. We even prohibit discussion of knitting needles, because, well…they have points.
Now, to be crystal clear: I’m a terrible moderator. That’s not fishing for compliments, that’s the honest-to-Bob truth. Most days I log on, make sure no one is on fire, look at the moderator reports that have been addressed and closed by the responsible moderators, root around in the refrigerator for some snacks, and then shuffle away. And yet.
Even in our silly little corner, I think we’re all painfully aware of the racism, homophobia, transphobia, and a host of inequalities which our peers battle on some of the other forums on Ravelry. We also know that even when we do encounter them, they do not impact us equally. The drama in our group is rather banal, honestly (let’s keep it that way please) but other groups haven’t been so lucky. Other forum moderators have shared examples of ways supporters of regressive policies use avatar images to intimidate or harass even when not posting specifically about political issues. And forum participation isn’t the only way that users can be subjected to bigotry – this is a much larger issue than forum participation.
I responded to their announcement with a tweet of support (which I stand by and don’t regret) and went on about my day.*
Well.
Screencapture of my tweet supporting Ravelry’s decision, which enraged Trump supporters who feel they are the Real Victims of hate speech.
The announcement brought out the very best in angry people who don’t knit and have never heard of the site. Many want to explain in great detail how they aren’t bigots by hurling racial epithets for emphasis. Fun for the whole family! Knitters of color are dealing with a much greater onslaught, as they juggle the outright hate of Trump supporters with Black best friends AND the tears of White ladies who are so sorry for what seems maybe like casual racism but isn’t really because their best friend in college was Black.
What’s really exciting has been learning how many Trump supporters have Black Best Friends and Trump supporting Black Gay Jewish kids! I feel like maybe some of the messages I’ve received aren’t entirely true. But I digress…
This turned into a big story, and Buzzfeed, NPR, the Guardian and many other news sites weighed in. Even Stephen Colbert had things to say last night:
There’s been the predictable rending of garments (presumably store-bought) and gnashing of teeth – primarily from non-crafters who’d never heard of the site before the announcement went up – but the response on the site has been largely positive and energetic.
Donations to the Ravelry to assist with fortification against bots and trolls and generally to show love and support for what Jess and Casey have built has been impressive.
*I do regret that I inadvertently replied to both Ravelry and another twitter user, because she then got swept along in some vitriolic replies directed at Ravelry and/or me.
It has recently come to my attention that I’ve saved the meager posts I did manage to write in 2018 as drafts and never noticed any of them had thus not been published. Well, 2018 has been that kind of year, hasn’t it?
While I sort this out, here’s a hippo video worthy of the class and grace you’ve come to expect at this site:
I,Frankenstein (2014) is GREAT. If your use of the word “great” is at the start of a sentence that begins “Great! There is at long last a worthy partner for Reign of Fire, the 2002 epic in which Matthew McConaughey and Christian Bale take off their shirts and fight dragons.”
I always expected that the double-feature-mate for Reign of Fire would be a Ben Kingsley movie. Sure, that dude was Gandhi, but that dude has also been in some seriously craptacular movies. Un-ironically.
I, Frankenstein does, however, have Bill Nighy, so that’s nice. No Liam Neeson, but I kept confusing Frankenstein’s monster (Aaron Eckhart) with Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) and assuming that I’d spaced out during the scenes where he learned how to fight from Ra’s al Ghul, because that was the only way I could really make any narrative sense out of this thing.
Hey, if you look at it that way, the film is honorarily somewhere on the Axis of Neeson-Nighy, which. is definitely a thing and not something I just made up.
This film is so expensive, yet so cheap-looking. I, Frankenstein has the insane Whatthefuckitude of SciFi Pictures Productions circa 2003-4 but with the smug seriousness of Underworld, but with a budget. A big budget.
And the grunting and growling! Oh god, so many characters growl. It reminds you how rare growling is in contemporary cinema. Aside from werewolf movies, just not a lot of growling these days. I, Frankenstein goes all-in on the growling.
Oh, gods, and the ineptitude of the effects! They have the modern syfy intentionally-shitty-looking-to-seem-hip aesthetic, but clearly aren’t intentionally shitty. And the scale of the set pieces! The deranged self-serious terribleness boggles the mind! And, and, and…the GROWLING!
After a great weekend with the Museum of Science Fiction at Escape Velocity 2017, I must to return to reality, which is a little sad.
Keeping me inspired from 1/2 way around the world, my fab colleague Dr. Becca Peixotta (Swampscapes) is back in South Africa working on the Rising Star Expedition with Lee Berger and the rest of the amazing Homo naledi exploration crew.
The best way to follow their adventures is probably to follow John Hawks (@johnhawks) on Twitter.
I’ll post more links to expedition members and projects later, but now I’ve got to finish revising an article before an editor puts a bounty on my head….
