- On considering reading George R.R. Martin This is a fascinating essay on a way of reading that is incredibly different from my own. I don’t read for structure at all and, when I do try to write fiction, structure is incredibly hard for me to wrap my head around.
- Book-Ends And here’s another way of reading!
- Invisible Labor in the Publishing World
- On Wanting A Book To Fail
- Peril vs. Ponies: Mercedes Lackey’s Closer to Home This is a completely wonderful review and I’m going to suggest that folks keep it open for a chaser–there’s a lot of ick in my links folder this week.
- Feds ‘Hacked’ Silk Road Without A Warrant? Perfectly Legal, Prosecutors Argue
- Why blue LEDs are worth a Nobel Prize
- Breaking 43 Years of Silence, the Last FBI Burglar Tells the Story of Her Years in the Underground
- Cave paintings change ideas about the origin of art
- Did a White Guy Steal a Popular Gossip Site from Three Black Teenagers?
- Codpieces and willy warmers This is for several certain someones. You know who you are.
- Of Human Bondage Have I mentioned lately that Charlie Pierce is a national treasure? Because he is.
- 5 Things to Do When Your Story is Rejected
- ‘This Impromptu Dance’: Geoffrey Holder’s Son Tells One More Story This is beautiful. Get the tissues ready before you read it, though.
- Tilde.Club: I had a couple drinks and woke up with 1,000 nerds Mixed feels about this whole thing.
- Men Can Finally Pay Someone to Explain Feminism to Them Love The Womansplainer.
- Why It Matters E. Catherine Tobler talks about why the gender imbalance in F&SF is such a big deal.
- “‘Pete & Pete’ Was All White People!” Shut up. Shut up shut up shut up. Also warning that a racially loaded word is used in the interview. More at Angry White Man Explains It All and Nickelodeon Expert Says the Channel Has Become “Too Diverse” In short: fuck off, Mathew Klickstein.
- Gone Girl and the Fallacy of Weaponized Female Sexuality Welp. Won’t be seeing this. Or reading it, either. Unless the book is significantly different from what’s described.
- List of ethical concerns in video games (partial) These would be actual ethical concerns. Not bullshit made up ones.
- The growing, unavoidable toxicity of Twitter
- Iceland’s men-only UN meeting on women I’m sorry, what?
- ‘Women’s intuition’ is just a sneaky put-down
- The Art of Social Protest
All the rest of these links should be assumed to have a content warning for misogyny, violence against women, and general grossness. It’s been a bad week for that.
- Trouble at the Koolaid Point Kathy Sierra leaves Twitter. Dammit. This is why we can’t have nice things. (In case Sierra takes her post down–as well she might–it’s been mirrored at Wired under the title Why the Trolls Will Always Win–with a nice big picture of Sierra’s harasser at the top of the article.)
- iPad Hacker and “Troll” Weev Is Now a Straight-Up White Supremacist Nice use of scare quotes around troll, Gawker. Weev is a troll. He is a horrible gross human being.
- Telling My Troll Story Because Kathy Sierra Left Twitter Adria Richards speaks up.
- Alt Lit is Dead – Burn the Corpses, Salt the Bodies
- We Don’t Have to Do Anything (content warning: drug use)
- On sexism, sexual assault and the threat of the ‘non-bro’
- Regarding #teamharpy and sexual harassment
- Social Justice Warriors and the New Culture War
- Stories Like Passwords All of this. Oh, all of this.
- What Counts? Elizabeth Ellen and What Makes A Victim
- Jennifer Lawrence Calls Photo Hacking a “Sex Crime”
- Silencing, librarianship, and gender: missing voices
- Growing up in public, acting out online I’m not sure the answer is as easy as this sounds.
- Still and again this question arises
- The H Word: The H is for Harassment (a/k/a Horror’s Misogyny Problem)
- Turning over a rock and exposing slime to the light
- Stop supporting Gamergate and The longterm plans of #Gamergate
- Before We All Talk About What Happened at The University of Wisconsin Milwaukee
- What you can do
‘Gone Girl’ is a lot more complex and nuanced than the single talking point a lot of people have boiled it down to. I gave it a shot and wasn’t at all disappointed. If you give it a fair try, I don’t think you will be either.
(Of course, this also depends on how much you like noir-ish thrillers and seeing largely terrible people do terrible things to each other. )
My tolerance for thrillers is actually pretty low in general, I don’t like gore, and I am not really a fan of terrible people doing terrible things to each other. So chances are good that it’s just not a movie (or a book) that’s a good fit for me. Which is fine, really. Not everything has to appeal to everyone.
@Natalie Luhrs: @Natalie Luhrs: I can understand that, my wife is much the same way. She read the book on the recommendation of both her sister and her mother and the only reason she finished it was because she knew they were waiting for her to talk about it.
http://www.salon.com/2014/09/30/stop_telling_women_not_to_take_things_personally_ed_champion_and_the_plague_of_gendered_criticism/