CompilerBitch's Journal

Hi Folks,

I made it to Devon Island a little over a week ago now. I've not had comms until today because we only just got the Ka-band satellite dish working this afternoon, so this is the first chance I've had to get these out and to catch up on the week's backlog of email.


Windswept

It has been pretty windy here -- up to and just over 30 knots some of the time. It's forecast 60 - 75 in Resolute in a couple of days, which means we'll get hit pretty hard too. Hopefully our tents will survive, but cube law and all that -- double the wind speed, increase the force by a factor of 8. My tent is staked out with enormous tent pegs, fully guyed out, and every peg has a bigass rock sitting on top of it. It's also a brand new Mountain Hardware Trango 3.1, which is designed for nontrivially bad conditions, so I should be OK. I'll be tightening my guy lines and checking the pegs before bed tonight though.

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On the nose

As most of you have probably figured out by now, I'm currently in Resolute Bay in the Canadian high arctic, waiting to be flown over to the HMP field site on Devon Island (most likely tomorrow or the day after that). I've been armtwisted to process some photos and get them online, so here you go.

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Just a quick message to say that we arrived safely in Resolute Bay last night. Today is going to be cargo sorting mostly. I'll hopefully be back online a bit this evening. I think the plan is we're going to the island tomorrow, but that's not definite yet.

I'll try to post a few photos later, but for now I have to run to head to Polar Shelf.

This may be my last post for a while. I'm currently in Vancouver, finalising loading the C-130.

Current plan is, we leave early tomorrow morning, takeoff should be around 9am. We're refuelling in Yellowknife, then continuing on to Resolute in one go so I should be there by evening. I may or may not have comms there -- likely yes, but it's possible I won't. I'll be in Res a couple of days, then we'll be heading to Devon Island most likely on Monday and opening camp. Latest news is that we'll most likely not have comms until sometime around mid-July, maybe the 10th but possibly later (or even not at all).

I'll be shooting photos as always, but there may well not be much in the way of updates. Apologies in advance for that, and please don't worry if you don't happen to hear from me.

Zoom!

But I don’t.

You see, I have my own moral compass. This is not an easy path, particularly if you really mean it.

Jesus would have forgiven you…

But I won’t.

Not for this. Not for selling out like that, not for forgetting the basic message of your own religion and giving in to the hatred of the people who would seek to control you.

But, what about Leviticus? What about Paul?

Well, what about them? Leviticus was an extreme homophobe with a bizarre dislike for seafood. Paul was a misogynist. I see no evidence that Jesus was any of those things. What, are you telling me that you don’t believe in Jesus? That you prefer the opinions of a couple of hangers-on (who, it should be said, never met the man Himself?)

Jesus would probably have forgiven you for that, too.

Oh right, it’s in the Good Book.

So who put it there? Was it Jesus?

No, it was the centuries of church leaders who sought to control you and your ancestors.

So why did you let them?

Oh, that’s right. They had a bit of a liking for burning people at the stake for disagreeing with them. Not being burned at the stake is a good plan, in my opinion.

But, this is 2009. No stakes around here. No public crucifixions.

You are allowed your own moral compass. No one is going to burn you at the stake for it. Jesus will still love you.

So, evolve yourself a spine. Do the right thing. Stop listening to the people who would control you through their hatred and your fear.

Do the right thing.

Then, I will forgive you.

My name is Sarah, but I am Other. I am, if you like, cut from different cloth. My archetype had some versioning issues. When god handed out the Normal, I was looking the other way, daydreaming about something more interesting than queuing.

I’m not Other by choice, though my choices have played a part. In some sense, if you’re already Other by dint of the universe declaiming Fiat Weird! at your conception, then adding a few extra Other points doesn’t do much more harm.

Otherness can be entailed in many ways, but at the heart of the matter is that it’s kind-of a Hamming distance from the default, privileged, white, Christian, male, middle class norm. As that distance increases, privilege decreases, and Otherness becomes unavoidable. Ultimately, it’s actually difference in Hamming distance that matters – it’s quite possible to be more Other than Other, and to be more privileged than privileged.

I’m Other as a consequence of quite a few things. My Hamming distance is pretty large. I’m trans, poly, kinky, bi, pagan, female, both queer and genderqueer, bright enough that many people have an issue with it. They are the big ones, but there are more.

Otherness isn’t a special club. There isn’t a secret handshake, or a newsletter. Beyond the bonding that occurs between veterans comparing battle scars, there’s not much in the way of community either. Being Other makes you a specialised taste, so whilst finding love is only made a little harder, finding lovers really is a lot more difficult. Not impossible, just harder. The same goes for finding jobs and housing.

Being Other puts you well down the privilege hierarchy. Stating that fact is typically interpreted as whining. Sure, I’ll whine. I’ll also adopt a characteristic None Shall Pass attitude should anyone try to use their privilege as a way to bully or control me.

Though I do not choose to be Other, I could choose to appear less Other. I could fake my Hamming distance down toward more acceptable levels. I could have chosen to not transition, and kept my perceived cisgendered privilege. No wait – I’d be dead by now if I’d done that. Suicide, most likely. Scratch that one. And, before I transitioned, people read something off about me anyway, so I still had much of the same difficulty. If anything, transitioning made interacting with people easier – for them, more than for me. Being genderqueer for me basically means being OK with not being a standard-issue, cookie cutter stamped out Acme Model 1 woman. I’m female-identified, but I’m not that. Not even close. But, my Hamming distance from cookie cutter Male is far larger, so I deal with what I’ve got. So that one’s not really a choice either, I couldn’t fake it even if I wanted to. I could be in the closet about being queer, poly, bi or kinky, but all that would do is make it even harder for me to find community. I could fake Christianity, but… no wait, I really couldn’t. Most variants would reject me out of hand, some would try to hammer me into a mould in order to crunch down that big old Hamming distance of mine. Some, very few indeed, would accept me with open arms, but there would still be the slight problem that, um, not actually Christian, and I have principles about lying about that kind of thing.

So what’s my point here? What’s the moral lesson to extract from this? What do I Want?

Ultimately, respect is good. It’s always good, and always a good thing to suggest, in the same sense that a doctor telling someone with bizarre symptoms to drink plenty of water is a good idea because, well, everyone should always try to stay well hydrated. But, seriously, to have Otherness respected is a rare thing. To have it Understood is incredibly special. Was I to ask for my hundred percent, that would be it.

Everyone in the lucid dream had a neat little remote control. More complicated than a TV remote, lots of fiddly little buttons. Round, black, with a couple of old skool LCD displays. We were in a virtual environment, a dream, and we were OK with that. The remotes let you translocate, and you could evoke people. Even better, it was integrated with OK Cupid, so you could evoke someone just by typing their handle into your remote and pressing one of the squidgy little rubber buttons. But the version of OK Cupid in that world was strange -- people were indexed by their major psychoses. An incredible abundance of people who could be evoked, but the reasons not to want to being right there in your face. I tried one anyway. Psychopath_36. They turned out to be an old friend I'd not seen in ages. Then I pressed a wrong button, translocated myself into a seat on an airliner taxiing toward takeoff, and by the time I found the go back button on my remote, she'd gone.

Surprisingly enough, under exactly the same user ID as here. Friend me! Friend me Now!

(Or circle me. Or whatever it is they call it there. It's pretty, though.)

This did the rounds of my friends on Twitter and LJ yesterday. It's taken me a bit of time to respond to it, partly because I wanted to think a bit first before writing it, and partly because it brought up a surprising amount of stuff.

Firstly, I was amazed to see this. A mainstream TV ad, albeit not English language, for something entirely unrelated to trans issues or civil rights, using that as its central message. This really is something quite out of the ordinary. Previously, I'd only ever seen trans people depicted in a jokey way, or as victims (though, this ad still has a twinge of that). In the past, I've more than once refused to go to see films with a trans theme, because typically the theme is ultimately demeaning to me. I know a lot of people, for example, who loved Hedwig and the Angry Inch, but, fucking hell, do you people have NO SENSITIVITY??? How am I supposed to feel watching that? And, I have, and kind of wish I hadn't bothered. Not an image I'd like to carry with me. I'm not your convenient joke, your convenient minority who is sufficiently non-trendy and disempowered that it's OK to poke fun at me. The permission for that is mine to give, and you don't have it.

So, back to the ad, and my take on it.

She got an apology.

To my memory, that has never happened to me. Not a sincere apology, anyway. The closest thing might have been my parents, after I refused to talk to them for about three months because they insisted on using incorrect names and gender pronouns against my wishes. I got a kind-of lame halfarsed apology that was framed more along the lines of, you know, you being angry about this is really upsetting to us, it's hard for us, you know, and you shouldn't be so mean about it. Too fucking bad. I'm me. Love me or fuck off. Sorry. Oh wait, no, I'm really not sorry, and I'm not going to comfort you when my reacting badly to you being crap to me upsets you.

I cried yesterday, alone, in my office. I cried because I'd never had that apology. I also cried because I'd never had apologies for many things I deserved apologies for, particularly as a child. The teachers who beat me and psychologically abused me never apologised. The children who bullied and terrorised me never apologised. My parents certainly never apologised for not giving a damn. When I confronted them about it, years later, they couldn't remember me ever having difficulties with bullying, even though I frequently came home bloody and bruised. My father has never apologised for becoming insanely angry at me, and terrifying me, whenever I reacted emotionally. My father has never apologised for molesting the three eight-year-olds that resulted in him spending three years in prison, or the effect that that had on me or the rest of my family. My father has never apologised for stealing over 20000 UK pounds from me, or for forcing his way into control of my first business, taking most of the profit and keeping me trapped living with them because I was earning a pittance.

No one has apologised for all the times I've not been promoted, or not hired in the first place, because I'm trans. No one apologised for throwing me out of Oxford at the end of my first year because I was transitioning. No one apologised for trying to kill me, on that train, in 1997, that left me with concussion and PTSD.

All of these little slices of poison, that stole my life-force, that held me back. That, in an ironic, painful and frankly fucking totally unnecessary kind of way, made me stronger than most people would imagine possible.

To the world at large: don't you ever dare ask me to apologise for being angry about this. That power is mine, and mine alone. I'm taking it back. Reclaiming that lost energy, that lost time, that lost love, that lost hope, that lost life-force. You can't have it. Mine.

I've finally finished processing the landscapes from my trip to the arctic this summer. If you've looked closely at my LJ, you'll have seen most of the images already, but there are another 17 images you've not seen before. The whole thing is sitting in a photo gallery on my web site here.

So, without further ado, here are all the new ones:



Beyond

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Just a test. Nothing to see here. Move along now...

(Checking out Flock at the moment, just trying out its posting client...)



Gratuitous photo:
tenacious_snail has ninja trouble

Poll #1273462 So, this book project, anyway...
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

If I put together a photo book (or books), you

What would you like to see in the book(s)?

Should this be one big book, or should it be split thematically?

What kind(s) of book/book-like-thing/whatever would you be interested in

Note that some of the above options are things I can't currently do because of my visa status. My intention for the moment would be to do this entirely on an at-cost basis, with me taking no part of any transaction (i.e you order a book or books direct from the printer/publisher at cost price). Prints I do like to give to people anyway, though the cost involved (to me) does put limits on that.

Also, this isn't in any sense committing anyone to buy anything -- I'm just trying to get a sense of what might and might not work for people, so even if you find yourself clicking the 'wouldn't buy it' option, I'd still be interested in your answers to the other sections.

In terms of likely cost, the bigger the book the more expensive it gets, so think about $15-20 for a paperback, $30 for a smaller hardback, $50-70 for a coffee table book (maybe more if it's really thick). The bound portfolio option will be spendy but gorgeous (think in the $200+ range, cost price is not that cheap). Unbound portfolios would be a bit less. I'm not sure about individual prints at this point, matted, unmatted or framed, because the not-being-seen-to-profit-from-it thing is trickier.

This is the teaser for Laurent Lichtenstein's documentary on HMP. OMG, I'm in the trailer. *hides*

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82101

This is the second set of images from the arctic aerial photography series. All of the images in this set were shot from the search and rescue window of an Air National Guard C-130 Hercules, during a series of flights from Resolute Bay to Moffett Field via Yellowknife and Vancouver. They were all shot hand-held with a Nikon D200, then postprocessed in Photoshop.

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737 Shines


This is the first of two (or possibly more) portfolios I'm putting together from aerial photography from my trip to the Haughton Mars Project site on Devon Island in the Canadian high arctic.

(All photos: Sarah Thompson/Haughton Mars Project)

During my trip, I found myself having considerable opportunity for aerial photography. In all, I photographed from a 737, a Beechcraft 100, a Twin Otter (two flights), a helicopter, and a C-130 Hercules (three flights). This portfolio is comprised of images from the 737, one of the Twin Otter flights and the helicopter. Locations are mostly Devon Island, unless specified.

Artistically speaking, what I am going for is applying a fairly forceful B&W presentation to aerial images, giving a traditional landscape photography feel to images that are more typically seen in mapping systems like Google Earth. All of these photos were shot with a Nikon D200, hand-held. The helicopter shots were shot without glass, with the door removed, so I was hanging out of the door from the copilot's seat, though I was wearing a 4-point harness. The other images were shot through windows, so I am grateful for finding glass with reasonably good optical quality.

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Ad Astra

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It's all over now, bar the unloading at the processing of the thousands of images.

:-)

I got to Res yesterday afternoon, so I'm now chilling out warming up at South Camp. I'll be here until the C-130 pickup, most likely on Thursday, so I'd best get on with making the most of it. :-)

More when I have news...

This is probably my last chance to get a message out before comms goes down. We're having pretty strong wind (not looked at the weather station, but probably 40kts at least), subzero temperatures and freezing fog. It's taken out the C-band dish, but the Ka-band is still up. As a consequence, our IP phones are now down.

Given the weather, the plan seems to be to pull people out as and when we can get planes in. Currently that's not happening. There is some possibility that the C-130 might be delayed by anything up to several days, or that we might be stuck on the island for a while (maybe several days). We have a lot of food, the infrastructure is holding up pretty well, so no one needs to panic, though be advised that you probably won't hear from me again until I manage to make it to Resolute, or possibly not even then since their comms is actually flakier than ours.

I'll post here again when I next have comms. See you all soon (I hope!).

One small step for a man and his dog
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)


Sea Ice 1
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)


Salute
(Photo: Haughton Mars Project/Sarah Thompson)


Yesterday, I took part in a moderately nontrivial traverse from base camp to the coast and back again. It was a 14-hour round-trip, truly punishing, across mile after mile of boulder fields by ATV. We'd cross a boulder field, then a river, then some mud, then another boulder field, then another boulder field with bigger boulders, then a boulder field with steep slopes... yeah, hard work. When I got back my hands were sufficiently sore from holding the handlebars that I had to get dangerpudding to put a plate of food in the microwave oven for me because I couldn't pick it up. But... the view at the other end was astonishing. As usual, I'm feeling the lack of Photoshop here, so these three are just really intended to be a taster, but I shot something like 800 frames, so hopefully There Will Be More later.

Today and tomorrow I'm not due to leave camp. Wednesday/Thursday there is a planned two-day megatraverse, but since I'm supposed to be flying out to Resolute on Thursday I don't know yet what I'll be doing in relation to the traverse.

Weather is getting noticeably worse, now. Night is almost dark, and it's much colder. This field season is the longest ever at HMP, and there is now a nonzero chance of being snowed in, which would be a problem since the Twin Otters won't be able to land. Maybe NASA will spring for heli pickup...