Tonight on Balloon-Juice After Dark: Strong women!
The Many Faces of Women Who Identify as Witches
The witch is often understood as a mishmash of sometimes contradictory clichés: sexually forthright but psychologically mysterious; threatening and haggish but irresistibly seductive; a kooky believer in cultish mumbo-jumbo and a canny she-devil; a sophisticated holder of arcane spiritual knowledge and a corporeal being who is no thought and all instinct. Even more recently, the witch has entered the Zeitgeist as a figure akin to the so-called nasty woman, who—in the face of a Presidential Administration that is quick to cast any criticism as a “witch hunt”—has reclaimed the term for the feminist resistance[…] The muddled stereotypes that surround witches nowadays are, in the end, not so very different from those used to define that perennial problem: woman.
In her portrait series “Major Arcana: Witches in America,” which will be shown at the ClampArt gallery, in Chelsea, beginning October 4th, the photographer Frances F. Denny seeks to explore the figure of the contemporary witch beyond the cultural chestnuts that have shrouded and obscured it. In the course of the past two years, Denny, who holds an M.F.A. in photography from the Rhode Island School of Design (where I taught her for a semester a number of years ago), has travelled in California, Louisiana, and along the East Coast, taking the portraits of dozens of women who identify as witches.
It’s a photo feature, so click through and take a look. I’d include a sample here but I’m too tired to remember how copyright works.
Open thread!
Updated because I remembered this:
I've never wished so hard that Alyssa Milano was a real witch. pic.twitter.com/Oqaw7210eq
— Meredith B. Kile (@em_bee_kay) September 27, 2018
Adam L Silverman
I thought you were referring to these:
Adam L Silverman
And with that, I’m going offline.
Inventor
Party o’ ten
O’ the town’s best men
Headed for Hattie’s shack
‘Said “Swamp Witch magic was useful and good”
and they gonna bring Hattie back
Never found Hattie
Never found the shack
Never made a trip back in
‘Twas a parchment note
they found tacked to a stone said:
“Don’t come lookin’ again!”
stinger
Lovely, powerful images — thank you for sharing the link.
NotMax
Repeating as it fits better in a true open thread.
What the eff are they smoking? Nothing says joy and good cheer like Dick Cheney. Talk about a surefire way to put a harsh on Christmas.
MagdaInBlack
I love this. Thank you.
My hair stylists thinks I’m a “witch” simply because my spiritual beliefs are non-christian based and I collect Quan Yin art.
I guess it all depends on what one thinks a “witch” is.
NotMax
Isn’t that what one orders at the chipper after happy hour when in Scotland?
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
So apparently Moore’s Law is coming to an end soon. Hopefully this will slow down the rate of automation so I’m not replaced by a robot before I retire.
Major Major Major Major
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Only relevant to hardware, there’s still plenty of room to grow with parallel/distributed virtualization!
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Major Major Major Major:
That sounds scary
/caveman
What does that EL5-style?
Major Major Major Major
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Loosely speaking, Moore’s Law refers to the growth in the amount of processing power you can cram into a cubic inch. However, there’s no shortage of cubic inches on the planet, and (with a sufficiently powerful data connection) you can outsource the processing to cheap cubic inches located elsewhere.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Major Major Major Major:
Define “located elsewhere”.
NotMax
@Major Major Major Major
Cubic inches are so 20th century. I’m holding out for tesseractal inches.
Major Major Major Major
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: elsewhere
smike
@Major Major Major Major:
“Moore’s law is the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles about every two years.
Moore’s law – Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law”
That’s what I always think of as Moore’s law, but your slant made me think.
Good.
Major Major Major Major
(added a funny/relevant tweet i remembered up top)
oatler.
The most compelling screen witches were Angela Pleasence in “From Beyond the Grave” and Jeanette Nolan in “SInce Aunt Ada Came to Stay’ (from Night Gallery”).
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Major Major Major Major:
So the cloud?
In other topics, I’m concerned about my novel containing a xenophobic subtext and I could use some advice.
Major Major Major Major
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: My advice is that you should start writing. You’ll find you have many more problems than a xenophobic subtext. And by the time you’ve really got something worth worrying about the subtext on, it’ll probably be so different it has entirely different subtextual problems.
I find “the cloud” to be a mostly useless term, but yes, “the cloud.”
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Major Major Major Major:
You’re probably right on that. It’s just I’m so busy I don’t have a whole lot of time to write. And honestly, I wouldn’t know where to start if I did. I can imagine just cringing at my own writing after I’d written it. I don’t know how to properly format the writing or where to put the punctuation marks/commas with the dialogue. I guess reading a book could fix that. And I do know the general rule of thumb for starting new paragraphs wrt dialogue.
I’m worried about creating Mary Sues and giving them flaws that are important but aren’t consistently applied and making them realize they were wrong in situations that aren’t truly important.
I get easily discouraged I guess since I read a lot of critiques of works I like. The criticisms are often about flaws I never noticed and so I call into question my own tastes as well as my own potential writing abilities.
Would taking a creative writing class help?
NotMax
@oatler.
Kim Novak wasn’t exactly chopped liver. (Bell, Book and Candle)
gwangung
@Adam L Silverman:
Though after Thursday, this might be more appropriate:
(Red Lantern oath, for non-comics reader; runs on hate).
Ken
@NotMax: I don’t see the problem. Hollywood’s been releasing horror films on Christmas day for years now.
Major Major Major Major
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: For sure! Oftentimes the value of a creative writing class is just that it provides you with a structured outlet for reading, writing, and talking about writing–but it sounds like that’s something you need.
“Begin where you are” is always good advice, to quote Thoreau.
NotMax
@Ken
Guessing they were too timid to title it Citizen Dick.
;)
James E Powell
@oatler.:
I go with Fairuza Balk in The Craft if we’re only counting movies. Elizabeth Montgomery if we’re including television.
Martin
@smike: There’s a broader law, which Moore’s law is mainly just an application of, which is the Law of Accelerating Returns. Effectively it says that the computational power of the species is exponential. This incorporates inventions such as the abacus, the mechanical adding machine, but also theories around calculus and statistics, the printing press, the ability to communicate and organize information. Remember, ‘computers’ were originally (mainly) young women that worked out calculations and then printed them in books. Those books could then be printed in bulk and purchased by anyone, thereby multiplying the effort of that individual times the number of copies of the book. And so on.
Semiconductors simply took over where CRC Press started to run out of steam. The internet made that distribution of information cheaper and broader. Mobile processors push that further. The new iPhone puts 5 trillion operations per second in your pocket, and Apple will sell 250 million of them in the next year.
The promise of machine learning isn’t that it learns better than humans, rather that once something has been learned and turned into an algorithm, it can be almost instantly and perfectly transferred to those 250 million devices. It takes decades to train a person from birth to anything we’re willing to pay money to hire to do. Once one machine learns how to do something like recognize an object, then virtually all machines can learn to do it almost instantly. That’s the next acceleration.
I’ll note something about M4s statement. He says ‘volume’ but semiconductors are for the most part two dimensional due to limitations in manufacturing processes. This suggests that there is still a full dimensional gain to be made. I’m not suggesting that’s easy, or that it’ll even be made using semiconductors, but eventually it’ll be made by something manufacturable.
Ken
@oatler.: I rather liked the witches in Night of the Eagle (American title Burn Witch Burn), largely because it was left ambiguous whether they actually had supernatural powers.
(Night of the Demon would have been so much better if they could have done the same, but the producer insisted otherwise.)
Major Major Major Major
@Martin: I was trying to conjure consumer hardware, so I decided to go with volume.
Ken
@Martin: Manufacturing issues aside, I’d think heat dissipation would be the biggest hurdle for 3D chips.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
No love for Veronica Lake?
NotMax
@Jim, Foolish Literalist
Cute flick but it’s a toss-up as to whether she was a better actress than she was a witch or a better witch than she was an actress.
Sister Golden Bear
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Ya gotta start somewhere….
Plus the revision process itself can be a learning experience.
First you realize that you’ve created a Mary Sue with flaws that are important but aren’t consistently applied, in situations that aren’t truly important. Then you figure out how to fix that. Then in fixing it, you figure out how to avoid doing so in future. Or at least doing it less frequently. Repeat. And repeat.
Major Major Major Major
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: @Sister Golden Bear: it should also be noted that caring about such things makes you better than a lot of published authors already!
MagdaInBlack
“Witches of Eastwick” despite Susan Sarandon
@James E Powell:
Endora ?
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Major Major Major Major:
I just thought of a way to potentially get around the xenophobia issue: people aren’t ready for the return of magic/creatures yet! It’s kind of a cop-out since my real vision and the crux of the story is power, oppression, and autocracy that the presence of magic/superpowers can mean. I guess my issue is that I want to have my cake and it eat it too (diversity is important, is the spice of life, and that all life has value vs extra-dimensional people/beings with magical powers could pose dangers to the freedom/autonomy/existence of wider human society and the government isn’t completely unreasonable to hunt them down as an existential threat).
Major Major Major Major
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: That’s another thing: while it’s good to know what your themes are, IMO you should remember that you’re first and foremost telling a story. Don’t let ham-fisted motifery get in the way of that.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
And re: the government.
That opens a whole ‘nother can of worms considering who’s in power now. I could completely ignore the current poltical context and use viewpoint characters, including reasonable authority figures at the very top) to represent the government as being well-meaning and sincere, but the wider machine being somewhat self-interested at the same time.
I could go 20 minutes into the future and portray a United States that has slipped into “managed democracy” a la Putin’s Russia as well. Of course, that might ruin a potential dichotomy I’m setting up with a character (one of the dual? protagonists) from a medieval setting learning about the importance of modern human rights and democracy. I suspect someone from a place like that wouldn’t necessarily be averse to autocracy.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Major Major Major Major:
I feel like my themes are what’s partially driving my creative process. That the themes and the plot/characters are inextricably linked together.
Major Major Major Major
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: sure, it’s great to have guiding lights and guard rails.
normal liberal
@Martin:
Cray tried 3D years ago. The flat circuit boards were arranged in a “C” shaped array, which was inset with another. The paired blocks were surrounded by more of the same, and because of the massive heat output, the whole thing was submerged, for lack of a better word, in an exotic form of antifreeze.
The CIA had one of these, way back when. I remember seeing photos of the cabinet in Fortune.
This was more successful than Cray’s attempt to replace silicon as the substrate for manufacturing chips with gallium arsenide – the latter was tricky to work with, there was a high failure rate, and of course there was the problem with the arsenic fumes.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
The SNL cold open was fantastic, the rare SNL piece that could have been longer, and the Alyssa Milano joke cracked me up.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Major Major Major Major:
I appreciate everyone’s advice and really just like having a sounding board to evaluate my ideas and opinions on.
I guess what I’d really like, which I know is difficult since there’s nothing written as of yet, is what you specifically like and what you would recommend I change.
Origuy
@normal liberal: Westinghouse Nuclear had a Cray in Warrendale, outside Pittsburgh.. I was there in the early 80s when I worked for Control Data. It had a cushioned bench on the outside, so I made a point to sit on it.
Major Major Major Major
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
ETA seriously though. Trust your vision at least a little. Get cracking.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Major Major Major Major:
I meant the general outline and ideas I’ve mentioned already. I just wanted to know what your opinion on it was
Major Major Major Major
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: I think it sounds interesting! But I wouldn’t lean too heavily on the Merlin angle. Why not make it somebody else from that whole mythos? Or make up your own character from it? Having Merlin as a main POV seems a bit much.
normal liberal
@Origuy:
I’m envious. I was never a real computing geek, but I was completely caught by a description of the interlocking chips in what I think was the Cray 2, maybe 3, done because the design was constrained by the speed of light.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Major Major Major Major:
He was never going to be a main character, more like a supporting mentor like one. One of the dual protags was going to be a shonen hero adventurer type that could use magic. Merlin has been living on our side for a thousand years or has only recently gotten captured by the corrupt tech billionaire character to achieve immortality.
Amir Khalid
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
It’s all in the execution. General outlines and ideas can be critiqued only in general terms. If you haven’t started writing yet, there is really nothing for others to critique. You need to start developing the specifics of your story BY WRITING IT. Until you start actually writing, you’re just a wannabe.
OzarkHillbilly
This is where we are with an idiot President, that someone felt the need to close an article with the simple declaration that, “The F-35 is not invisible.”
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Amir Khalid:
I understand and that’s fine. I just wanted to know if others thought it showed promise or not. ATM, I just don’t have a bunch of time to write.
Major Major Major Major
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: ok. Really though, what @Amir Khalid said.
Major Major Major Major
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: everybody has time to write. Sit down and do it.
OzarkHillbilly
Otis Rush– RIP.
So Many Roads
Major Major Major Major
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: I read slush piles. This sounds better than a lot of stuff. But it doesn’t exist yet.
??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??
@Major Major Major Major:
I’ve tried doing that in the past. Shit came out. Granted, that was when I was in middle school and I had to do it for an assignment. It was pretty much a wall of text, contained only one character, and had no dialogue. It was about a guy turning on CERN and destroying Earth. No, I need to do some studying on how to write properly so I’m not going in blind and wasting time. And my studying time is taken up with college now.
NotMax
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Not much to have an opinion about while it’s an inchoate string of concepts.
Two points:
1) it’s not work for hire; write what you want the heart of it to be, not what we want. As Amir wisely noted, save the refinement for after something is put on paper
2) sometimes things go in a direction beyond fixing, so don’t be afraid to chuck an effort and come back at it from a different tack.
There’s good writing and there’s bad writing. But there’s no such thing as failed writing.
themomcat
I am a doctor (MD), a surgeon, for over 40 years. I am a witch. Many of us who practice the craft are professional women and men. I dress like everyone else in my profession when I’m not in the OR. The only thing anyone who does not know me notices is the pentacle a clear crystal at the center. While I respect the women who came out to be featured in this article, they are not representative of Wiccan (Pagans) women and men who work every day side by side with Christians, Jews, Muslims, Atheists, etc from serving you fast food, to collecting your trash to saving your life.
This article is part of the problem for the “muddled stereotypes that surround witches” as is the photographer’s exhibit who forgot to seek out and include our fellow witches, men.
Major Major Major Major
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Jesus Christ, I’ll edit a couple pages for you.
NotMax
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
Bothers me that can no longer remember who said it, however the quote is indelibly etched in the gray matter.
“The only way to play the harp is to play the harp.”
Mike in DC
@normal liberal: My takeaway is that we’re not encoding transistors on preons(subatomic particles) any time soon(if ever), and that Ray Kurzweil is largely selling baloney. At some point we hit a wall, or at least a prolonged valley.
sm*t cl*de
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
Merlin got captured by the evil scientists in “That Hideous Strength”. He got captured by the evil medievalists in Dickinson’s “Changes” Trilogy. Merlin always gets captured.
Boussinesque
@Martin: when I was applying for a job with IBM for their Synapse project years ago, what they had was a 3D, tileable, neural net architecture (they were having to develop a new style of programming language to use with it, because the underlying logic was so different—or at least that’s what I can recall now), so I think that forays into using “volume”, as you stated above, are ongoing and could see advances sooner than we might think.
OzarkHillbilly
@NotMax: And somebody else said, “The only way to play the bagpipes is don’t.”
sm*t cl*de
@OzarkHillbilly:
The only way to play the Chinese cucurbit flute is backwards,
https://boingboing.net/2018/09/28/performer-plays-flute-from-wro.html
sukabi
@Major Major Major Major: also write what you know.
OzarkHillbilly
@sm*t cl*de: Which reminds me that the only way to cut crown mold is upside down and backwards.
sm*t cl*de
@sukabi:
I always write about drunk people ranting at pubs.
sukabi
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: It’s about choices. You have plenty of time to spend here talking about writing, you could use that time to, I don’t know… hmmmm…write.
sukabi
@sm*t cl*de: you near DC? You could wrie about shitfaced Kavanaugh.
OzarkHillbilly
@sukabi: I thought that was what we were doing. ;-)
Lee
I’m at the Orly airport in Paris. Just left my youngest in Fontainebleau for school. Lots of tears but I guess that comes with being a parent.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I predict that before this is done Donald Trump will announce on national TV he was a witch who was burnt at the stake in a past life. because it’s that dumb.
Amir Khalid
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
There is no set of writing tricks to be mastered. You just keep going at it until you get it right.
Mary G
When I was four we moved from LA to Orange County. I had been in the hospital for a couple of months while my parents got the house set up, and when I finally came down I was playing outside, and another kid came up to me and warned me that “You can’t play there, the lady is a witch. Really, a real witch.” He was referring to my mother. I said, “why yes, she is,” which ended up being one of the things that got me expelled from kindergarten.
NotMax
@Mary G
Funny, would think I’d remember hearing about an entire kindergarten class being shut down due to repeated plagues of locusts.
:)
Amir Khalid
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
He might even cite it as justification for his tste for burnt steak, and that would be really dumb.
sm*t cl*de
@Amir Khalid:
Fail again. Fail better.
Ken
@NotMax: Reminds me of Dream’s library in the Sandman series, which is filled with all the books their authors dreamed of, but never got around to writing.
El Caganer
Let’s not forget that women preserved civilization through the ages: https://beerandbrewing.com/how-women-brewsters-saved-the-world/
donnah
If you want to write, there are no excuses. It should consume you. You should be writing late into the night, scribbling on napkins, piling page after page until you have to sift through to remember what plot twists have come and gone, and what your characters’ next moves will be.
Talking about it isn’t writing.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
@Mike in DC:
Ars Technica
Intel has had trouble transitioning to a 10nm process for a while, though rumor has it they’ve finally managed to overcome the reject rate.
I’m no engineer, but I personally believe electromigration will become more and more of a problem with each die shrink until they hit the wall and can’t shrink it any more without making the chip unusable.
Crashman
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: Not sure if this has been said yet but one of the real tricks of successful writing is lots and lots of revision. Start writing and don’t be embarrassed if it seems like trash. Just get your words out on the screen. Once they’re there, go back over them with a critical eye. See what works and what doesn’t, what can stay as is and what needs to be changed. Lots of professional writers operate like this. It’s work, but make yourself do it even if you don’t feel like it!
Citizen_X
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: I’ll point out that sometime-fellow jackal Hillary Rettig has a bunch of writings, including a book, on overcoming procrastination and the writing project.
Darrin Ziliak (formerly glocksman)
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
Nah, witch burnings were a real thing and DJT’s a legend in his own mind.
Trump will announce that he was Narcissa Malfoy in a past life and that he’s not a Voldemort supporter.
Barbara
Good article if you can stand reading one more thing about Brett Kavanaugh.
Source
mapaghimagsik
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??:
Other people have already touched on “you have to start somewhere”. And there’s something of value out of just writing, if only to get the occasional gold nuggets.
Creative Writing classes can be helpful, especially since reading critically can help your writing. It can help you also develop a thicker skin. I’m not a particularly social learning, and I’ve gotten a lot out of them — especially when you throw out the idea you’re going to learn how to write from them. You might, but the hard expectation is a wall unto itself.
Mo MacArbie
@??? Goku (aka Amerikan Baka) ??: There’s a set of musical instructional videos put out by Mike Seeger (that double as magnificent banjo porn), and he starts each one saying (paraphrased) “And don’t worry about finding your own style; you already have it.”
Mary Ellen Sandahl
@NotMax: Hermione Gingold for me. The splendid Mrs. DePass!
“But where is one to find a blasted heath nowadays?”