Pinhole book, Star Wars Day, I like this thing

May 4, 2023   Issue #560

Something fun

Remember fun?

Happy Star Wars Day!

My book

This is about Under Alien Skies, isn’t it? Yes. Yes it is.

BAN reader Nick Dvoracek sent me this way cool photo of my book — not only was this taken using actual film, but it was with a pinhole camera, too!

Pinhole cameras are cool; at its most basic it’s a box with a sheet of film mounted on one inside wall, and on the other side is, literally, a pinhole, a very small hole punched in the box. No lens! Because the hole is so small, any beam of light coming in and hitting the film has to come from the same direction: the direction the side of the box with the hole is facing. That means the light rays hitting the film are very nearly parallel, and that almost by definition means they are focused. Nick has a blog about it which is pretty cool.

I had never heard of the film he used, called Arista EDU 100. When I looked it up a photo of a film canister came up and I swear I could smell it. I used to roll my own Pan-X and Tri-X and develop them when I was in high school. Grandparents, explain it to your descendants.

Anyway, the books is still doing nicely in sales and I have some talks coming up about it, too. Will I see any of you this weekend at Clark Planetarium in Salt Lake City? I just did an unusually lucid interview for Utah Public Radio about it, too.

Piece of mind

I have opinions. I try to base them on evidence.

[This is a topic I would swear I’ve written about, but cannot find any evidence of it. If I have covered this in the past my apologies, but there’s new stuff here anyway so it should hopefully be worth a read.]

Here’s a thing that really bugs me: people declaring that something is bad, when what they really mean is they don’t like it.

This is extremely common in nerddom over TV shows and movies; people love to state that some flick or episode or series is objectively bad and no one should watch it. This may be a variation of what John Scalzi calls nerdgassing, but it’s more toxic. It’s gatekeeping and it sucks.

I wrote about this for The Old Blog in a post called “Love What You Love. Let Others Love What They Love”. That dealt with Star Trek, but it’s extrapolatable. I ended the article saying this:

The problem here is that someone with a strong opinion will think their opinion should be applied universally, but the mistake with that is that other people are different. They like different stuff, but the first person has the attitude that they shouldn’t. That’s the toxicity.

Thing is, it’s easy to fix with a slight shift of attitude. When you want to say, “this is bad”, instead say “I don’t like this”. An example: I don’t like cucumbers (this is true). But I don’t say “cucumbers are bad”, I say “cucumbers taste bad to me”. This goes from it being objective to subjective, and that is a very big deal indeed.

This is a difference in phrasing that leads to a vast difference in the way you see things. It changes your point of view from the main character to being a part of the wider world. That’s important, because, my friend, you may be the main character in your life but you are most definitely not in every other person’s on Earth. This change in attitude, in perspective, leads to a much greater empathy toward others, and that’s something we all need.

I’ve been saying this for years, but it came up again recently when I was reading Wil Wheaton’s Tumblr. He posted a diagram (from Tumblr user microbian though I don’t know if it’s original with them (note: in the time since I first drafted this article, that Tumblr has been deleted)) that shows these two concepts — “it’s bad” vs. “I don’t like it” — are orthogonal:

So you can like something that was objectively (or perhaps “arguably” is a better word) poorly made, and you can not like something that was poorly made, but in neither case is your opinion something everyone should agree with.

[As an aside: I sometimes will tweet that I like something, and then someone will reply saying they hate it. Here’s a tip: Don’t do that. It’s a jerk move. Let others enjoy things! If you want to have a polite discussion about the matter that’s fine, if dealt with carefully (like, “I’m glad you like that. What did you think about (this characteristic of it), because that bugged me”). Just don’t come bursting in with negativity when others are celebrating something. This is a lesson I sometimes need to take to heart myself!]

You shouldn’t impose your will on the Universe. Instead, understand you are a part of a great and wildly diverse collective of humanity, and respect that others may disagree with you on subjective grounds.

Imagine if everyone did that! The lowering of arrogance, the increase in empathy, the diminishment of “othering”, the creation of more support and mutual understanding that would flow from this. The world would literally be a better place.

And that’s an objective fact.

Et alia

You can email me at [email protected] (though replies can take a while), and all my social media outlets are gathered together at about.me. Also, if you don’t already, please subscribe to this newsletter! And feel free to tell a friend or nine, too. Thanks!