Happy holiday-in-the-US weekend, everyone! I’m heading down to the mountains this weekend for a much-anticipated visit with my bestie–I hope everyone has a safe and excellent start to the summer here in the northern hemisphere. My regular Monday post will be appearing on Tuesday.
- Unhappy Birthday: 14 Photos Of Morrissey Celebrating His Birthday With Cats!
- Revenge, ego and the corruption of Wikipedia This sort of thing absolutely fascinates me. I’ve looked into how one edits on Wikipedia and I have to admit that the process seems entirely too prone to argument for me to be comfortable with it.
- Unknown mathematician makes historical breakthrough in prime theory I have no idea what this means but it’s awesome regardless.
- Mindscapes: First interview with a dead man Whoa.
- “We Have Always Fought”: Challenging the “Women, Cattle and Slaves” Narrative Kameron Hurley hits it out of the park with this essay at A Dribble of Ink.
- Why Do Men Keep Putting Me in the Girlfriend-Zone? This is an awesome post with some major major major fail in the comments. I don’t recommend even glancing at them.
- The Real Problem With “Check Your Privilege”: It’s Too Generous
- LUSH Cosmetics: Kind to Animals, Not to Women I was already pretty much off the LUSH bandwagon due to them 1) discontinuing everything I liked and 2) all their new stuff smelled like circus peanuts, the grossest candy in the history of the world.
- Mississippi Could Soon Jail Women for Stillbirths, Miscarriages THE HELL.
- Unexcited? There May Be a Pill for That. I honestly couldn’t even read past the first page because the name of this drug is so ridic: “Lybrido”.
- Director Justin Lin Shifts The Identity Of ‘Fast & Furious’
- And, of course, the big book news this week was the announcement from Amazon about Kindle Worlds. Here’s a selection of reactions–if you only read one of these links, I recommend that it be the last one:
- Amazon’s Kindle Worlds: Instant Thoughts
- ALERT ALERT ALERT
- Kindle Worlds: Not bigger on the inside
- WHAT FRESH HELL IS THIS AMAZON “In my social theory classes in graduate school, I’ve been taught to ask one question above all others when considering something: Where’s the power? Put another way: Who benefits? Put another way: Where isn’t the power, and who doesn’t benefit? I think those are vitally important questions to consider here. And I don’t like the answers.”
- Amazon tries to monetize fan fiction; I freak out
- Amazon to monetize fan fiction, he moaned I’d quote my favorite bit but it would ruin the punchline. So I won’t.
- On Being And Unbeing A Singer This is how I feel about writing.
- I Am Not A Good Writer Except, you know: Mary Ann is a very good writer.
- Why I Love Science Fiction Romance I thought this was a really great analysis of why SFR works for some readers–and gave me some thoughts about why it doesn’t for others.
- Polyamory Pleasures: Laurell K. Hamilton’s A Kiss of Shadows I have to admit that I never looked at these books from this particular perspective before.
- New Adult is All That—In a Bad Way I don’t EVEN. This is a strange, shame-y, and all-round incomprehensible piece of writing. As my ever-delightful spouse pointed out:
@eilatan Hookup Culture! Sense of Entitlement! It Wasn’t Like That When We Were That Age! It’s like the Triple Crown of Pearl-Clutching.
— Paul Ward (@MrEvilena1) May 21, 2013
- Mrs Giggles reviews Walking Disaster by Jamie McGuire “‘A buffet of limp vegetables, dry meat, and overripe fruits’ is not the thought of a realistic male asshole, it’s the expression of contempt from a woman who uses her male protagonist as an excuse for readers to indulge in over 430 pages of pointless bashing of women that are more popular and more beautiful than they.”
- All About Romance reviews By Love Unveiled by Sabrina Jeffries I’ve read two of Jeffries novels (newer ones than this) and have not been terribly impressed.
- Elementary Demonstrates the Right Way to Update a Classic Hero I love this show so much and this interrogation of the canon is a big part of the reason why.
- Blake Charlton on Defining My Dyslexia
- Another plagiarism scandal hits poetry community
- Is this the end of fiction’s genre wars? “I don’t know of a single serious critic nowadays who would dismiss genre writing solely on the basis that it is genre writing. To that extent, the “genre wars” are over. Could more be done? Of course: book festivals, for example, still tend to pair up genre writers; publishers spend more time marketing already successful genre books than other novels…”
- Drew Magary on The Author’s Guide To Reading Online Reviews
- Would You Want to Be Friends With Humbert Humbert?: A Forum on Likeability “What’s disappointing isn’t the reader having that reaction, as if the book were real life. Rather, it’s the timidity of readers’ judgements sometimes—their wanting characters to be “nice,” their punitive reaction if the character is headlong, or extravagant, or selfish—particularly if it’s a female character, and a female reader. (Male readers seem less interested—is this a gross generalization?—in characters being “nice.”)”
- The Power of Fame I thought this was a nice story.
- The Killer Mobile Device for Victorian Women
- Open-plan offices make employees less productive, less happy, and more likely to get sick
- I feel oh so old now: 50 Things Only ’80s Kids Can Understand
- And I can’t stop laughing at this: Dictator Wear
- How We Imagined the Internet Before the Internet Even Existed (via)
- Xbox One is a desperate prayer to stop time
- And the last link this week is one that requires full disclosure on my part: I am the acquisitions editor for the publisher of the book mentioned in this post: “Space: it’s not just for straight white dudes,” says Ascension by Jacqueline Koyanagi. I am so excited about this book and have been for months now. I can’t wait for this story to be a real thing in the world.
