Johannes Punkt’s Flaskpost

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Tag: feminism

28/Jan/2013

Open Letter to Ken Woodruff

[Trigger Warning: rape, bad police officers, torture]

[Spoiler Warning: uh, season 2, episode 14 of The Mentalist]

Hello Ken,

I hope you appreciate feedback. This open letter concerns an episode, Blood In, Blood Out of the hit show The Mentalist, an episode which you wrote. More specifically it concerns the ending of it, which I felt was handled very very poorly. I know it is an old episode, and I hope that your writing has grown since.

When you (general you) do writing, you generally write about what’s important to you, and ignore what is not important. I think there was a scene in your episode where you (specific you) overlooked something very important, and I am going to explain why. Do excuse all this build-up before I get to my actual point. It is here so that you (or other readers of this letter) do not misconstrue my critique.

It was a well-told story; you explored a new side of Kimball Cho [an agent of law]; you tied everything together nicely at the end; there were some cool scenes with guns in them.

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1/May/2012

On Gender-Neutral Pronouns and Other Neologisms

I just figured something out. Gosh, I like the feeling of figuring things out. Goshdarn.

(This is a shortish post. I’ll be writing the first edition of the accompanying page sometime later this week or next week.)

Background: Most every time I present someone with a story where I use gender-neutral pronouns, they say that might distract from the story at hand. I mean, unless they are already as much for such pronouns as I am. The ones I prefer to use are ze and hir (English; pronounced ‘zee’ and something somewhere between her and here, like you started saying ‘his’ but switched the s to an r at the last second) and hen and henom (Swedish; you don’t need the pronunciation). I’ve seen it happen with friends’ stories too. This bothers me because they’re a pretty natural part of my vocabulary.

Solution: Just use more neologisms. Not quite James Joycing it up, but somewhere in that direction.

Just make it part of the story. I would like for language to be all cool with the use of gender-neutral (personal; third-person) pronouns that aren’t they, but obviously it is not. I could mope at individuals for not being as accepting or down with the feminism or [adjective] as I am, or I could just use more neologisms. I love making up words. This is so not a problem. If they think it still distracts (and hey, it still might) that is still their problem.

I will attempt to make a list of all the new words I will henceforth use in my writing. It will be good. It will have the word ‘pinnaturn’ in it, and it will be alphabetical. [EDIT: the glossary is now live: https://zombiesintelligently.com/glossary/]

Also: I totally won ScriptFrenzy with my super secret unbloggable script. Yay me!

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