- Sierra takes TechCrunch to task
- Writing Dissonance: Those Brave Disabled People
- Surviving A For-Profit School
- On Trayvon Martin and Our Fear of Smiling Black Men
- ‘Crack baby’ study ends with unexpected but clear result “‘Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine,’ Hurt said at her May lecture.”
- Carpe Sharknado
- Rodriguez Kept ‘Mexican Repatriation’ From Being Forgotten
- I Will Not Be Afraid of Women: Thoughts on RWA This is what Readercon is like for me but with less fancy dress. Also, I love the diagram. Are they in a peapod?
- Mako Mori and the Hero’s Journey
- The Visual Intelligence of Pacific Rim
- An Open Letter to Arme Hammer on the term “mommy porn”
- Blame The Writer
- Catherine Rosselle’s Creepy Spider Embroidery Crafts Look! More embroidery that’s only cool because its subject matter is not coded as feminine! Whee!
- Writers: You Might Be Doing It Wrong If…
- Comic-Con And Hollywood’s Fan Girl Problem Headline’s a bit misleading, story is not particularly well-written but it makes some good points.
- The Worst of White Folks
- White people
For the last year and some-odd months, there have been periods of time when waves of people on my newsfeed will change their profile photo to a picture of themselves in a hoodie. Under their photo or in their status, they will type, “I am Trayvon Martin.” Some of those people are white, some of them are not. I understand that this is done in solidarity, but I have not done these, because I am not Trayvon Martin. I don’t know what it was like to be him. I am Katie Prout. I am 25, I run far, I worry a lot, and I’m white. Trayvon Martin was a young black boy, and one way I know that I am not him is because people have said terrible things to me about young black boys and I have not told them to stop. Thinking about this makes me sick on more than just candy. Another way that I know that I am not Trayvon Martin is that today I got up to go buy some snacks, and I walked through neighborhoods where I do not look, dress, or sound like anyone else. I still got to come home.
- Why Being a POC Author Sucks Sometimes
- Call for Papers: Biology and Manners: The Worlds of Lois McMaster Bujold (Merrian pointed out on Twitter, though, that there’s nothing here about embodiment, bodies, or disability–an interesting omission.)
- Official Cosmos trailer! I am glad to see that there is a new spaceship of the imagination. However, I am disappointed that Neil deGrasse Tyson is not rocking a turtleneck.
- Why Finnish babies sleep in cardboard boxes
- “Theories of Pain” by Rose Lemberg
- Ant mega-colony takes over world
- Mystery book sculptor gives Edinburgh new work of art This is the best. The very best.
- This thing we are doing (a manifesto)
Instead, the science fiction future I have found myself in is a sea of scientifically improbable white faces, and I have sadly and with deep regret left most English-language fantasy behind to its its fae and its beautiful red heads and its dragons shaped all wrong. I found myself drifting away despite my wishes: disillusioned by yet another Anglo-Celtic barely veiled Arthurian dragony thing with some barbarous coloured people and a whole lot of white people (GoT, I’m looking at you); surrounded by humans on colonising, conquesting adventures through time and space. I started reading Chinese SF instead, but as a first generation adventurer into the world while that’s an option for me that’s not an option for all brown kids in an English-language world.
All hail Octophant!
Horrified about the Mexican “repatriation” of American citizens.