general update

[kindkit]

The Good: I finally got to do a bit of touristy "seeing Santa Fe" stuff, after several days of feeling cruddy. That was partly general crud/exhaustion, I think, and partly adjustment to the altitude (Santa Fe is at 7260 feet, or 2134 meters, and oxygen is fairly significantly diminished at that height). Anyway, today I went into downtown, the older part of the city, which has a lot of galleries and arty/touristy shops (including one nice independent bookstore where I nobly resisted temptation). Quite unexpectedly I found there was an arts-and-crafts fair going on, so I wandered around a bit. A lot of it was the usual stuff (pottery, silver and semiprecious-stone jewelry), as well as a rather problematic contingent of (apparently) white artists copying Native American artistic traditions, but there was also quite a lot to like.

I became rather enamored of some paintings and prints by Kevin Eslinger, especially his darkly funny portrait of Bert and Ernie. It's a wonderfully fannish thing and I thought some of you might get a kick out of it (not to mention the fabulous octopus adorning his homepage).


The Pretty Good: I've seen Inception. I liked it, although not as much as many others seem to have. (I don't have any problems with it--it was a fun and reasonably clever movie--but I don't quite understand why so many others are so wildly enthusiastic. But at least now I don't have to avoid posts about it.)


The Bad: I've chosen to leave the Hot Fuzz fan community sandfordpolice after the mod instituted an English-only policy in order to preempt possible Russian spammers. I'm all for banning spammers, but English-only has an ugly resonance, especially for someone living in the United States, where there is an active English-only movement inspired primarily by anti-immigrant sentiment. The mod is from the US too and is surely aware of this. I complained about the new policy, and so did several others, but the mod hasn't said anything about changing it, so I left. I hate the thought of missing out on new Hot Fuzz fics, but I can't support an English-only rule, even passively.

Comments

[nam_jai]

For what it's worth, I finally saw Inception myself, and had the same reaction as you did: It's a good movie, I mostly enjoyed it, but didn't fall in the overwhelming love for it. But, hey, if others are that enthusiastic about it, good for them.

I don't even get how the English-only policy is supposed to prevent spammers. Sure, the mod can't understand what a non-English post is saying, but Google Translate is actually quite good, good enough to give you the gist of the post, at least -- you'll know whether it's on-topic or not, and making this check would occupy all of two minutes of the mod's time. As for any links within it, someone could just as well make an on-topic post in English containing malicious links. So it's not only an exclusionary policy with nasty undertones, it's a rather weak defense against spammers.