What the normal people are doing while fans still believe in their own weirdness

Miss Universe Competition, National Costumes

It sneaks up on you. Miss Albania is wearing something pleasant and dignified. I'm not saying anyone would wear that on the street, but it wouldn't wreck your day to try.

Miss Angola's dress is kind of overdone, but it's still rather like clothes.

Miss Argentina is looking kind of Las Vegas.

Miss Aruba is definitely Las Vegas, but at least there's a coherent design and color scheme.

Miss Australia-- the look is kind of grab-bag and pointless, and I wonder what anyone was thinking.

With Miss Bahamas, The Mummers Parade has begun to show up. It isn't going to leave.

At some point, I realize that they're alphabetical by nation, and I begin to wonder what the US costume will look like, but I decide to let events unfold in their natural order.

I'm not going to describe every costume. I wonder if there's such a thing as cultural self-appropriation.

There's a lot of Vegas and a lot of mummers-- I guess they overlap. From their expressions, I think some of the women are not entirely pleased with their clothes.

I've reached the point where Miss Dominican Republic's outfit looks tasteful and reasonable. It's like going to a big juried craft show where everything is so expensive that the hand-carved $700 wooden room divider doesn't look especially high priced.

I have to admit, what Miss Haiti is wearing looks like fun.

Why is Miss Hungary wearing a vaguely futuristic outfit with cat ears?

Miss Portugal is wearing an actual national costume or something close to it. Not only could she walk in it, she could dance. Who let that happen?

Miss Tanzania's costume seems to have been influenced by video games.

We're made it to Miss United States. We have no culture to appropriate. No, I'm not going to describe it. I suffered, you can suffer.

Link thanks to eftychia.

The other barrier

seanan_mcguire posted about the importance of paper books for poor people. Books can be resold and don't require infrastructure.

There's another barrier which I haven't seen discussed much, and that's literacy. There are plenty of poor people who read well, but illiteracy is more likely to be common among poor people.

It seems as though there should be video for teaching adults to read-- possibly even competently produced and entertaining.

This isn't just for poor people-- illiteracy is so embarrassing that people are apt to conceal it. Video can be viewed in privacy.

There's a common belief that people can't learn to read as adults, but I have no idea what it's based on. The belief has been around since I was a kid, and should probably be revisited.

I also don't know to what extent illiterate people can use existing electronic media-- it seems as though the facilities for blind people would be enough with a little hand-holding to get started.

And one more issue, though I'm not sure how important it is. Non-fiction is likely to be more expensive than fiction. It's less likely to come out in cheap editions, and less likely to become cheap if used. This might just be an accurate measure of the demand, but it kind of gets to me.

I've been waiting for small presses to be able to produce mass-market-sized paper backs competitively, but I don't know whether it's even on the horizon. Weirdly, the prices for trade paperbacks don't seem wildly different between large and small presses. The prices for hard covers seem higher from small presses, but maybe they're aiming at the collector's market for that format. It's even possible that I'm not quite right about the trade paperbacks-- they're hard to evaluate because the sizes and prices vary.