BEE HOTEL! I REPEAT: BEE HOTEL.
- Apostrophes in Science Fiction and Fantasy Names Except Muad’Dib is a moon, not a constellation. Get it RIGHT, sheesh.
- South L.A. student finds a different world at UC Berkeley This is incredibly sad–Campbell was clearly not prepared for the massive shift in expectations at UC Berkeley but also, Berkeley was clearly not prepared to help him succeed. This is a really complicated and complex subject and there are no easy or pat answers.
- Abandoned Dogs Roam Detroit in Packs as Humans Dwindle I absolutely loathe this narrative about Detroit. This is also a complicated situation with no easy or pat answers. We are seeing the results of 50 years of resource starvation on a major American city.
- “Indescribably insane”: A public school system from hell And in a few years, perhaps dogs will be roaming the streets of Philadelphia’s neighborhoods, too.
- The Mako Mori Test: ‘Pacific Rim’ inspires a Bechdel Test alternative The Bechdel Test is useful but it is absolutely not the be-all and end-all of feminist content in media.
- In This Together: Duality in Two Apocalypses
- Queen Charlotte of Great Britain and Ireland
- A marker that even if you’re not racist, you are still a product of a society that is.
- Your Guide to Defensive Feminism
- This is what racism looks like. Obviously, it also appears in other ways, too. But this is particularly egregious.
- I’m Not Your Pretty Little Lotus Flower
- The Rape of Harriet Tubman
- Am I A Bully? One Angry Black Woman’s Reflection
- Reporter’s Notebook: Hopi Sacred Objects Returned Home I thought this was absolutely fascinating–but also a bit upsetting, too, to think that (white) people are so disrespectful of the Hopi that they treat their sacred objects like this.
- Hitler or Lovecraft? Oodles of warnings for gross racist statements. But also pictures of Hitler and Lovecraft all Blingee’d out.
- Song of the South at Worldcon This was all over Twitter on Wednesday–the convention committee has since announced that there will not be a showing of this (racist as fuck) film at Worldcon.
- The White Market This is kind of old but it’s a fascinating analysis of Breaking Bad.
- Antoinette Tuff: Meet the Woman Who Prevented a Mass School Shooting
- Freelance nation: When good jobs turn to bad
- The Farm Bill This is a personal story about how food stamps/food assistance can really make a huge difference in someone’s life.
- Anatomy of an Incident Pretty good breakdown of Dave Winer showing his ass on the internet the other day.
- Dear Miss Disruption As we all know, the answer to all of life’s problems is to learn to code.
- The New York Review of Books Publishes Mostly Men, Responds to Criticism With Condescending Form Letter
- Interview with Chuck Wendig & Stephen Blackmoore and In Which Blackmoore And I Answer “Women Author” Questions Note that some workplaces may identify that first link as adult content and block it accordingly. The second link is mainly there because the comments are full of questions that women have been asked–sexism, ahoy!
- And Megan Frampton has more on these kinds of questions: “A Vicariously Slutty Life”: Author Gender Switching
- Lady Takes Chickens Into Space Moonapillars!
- Tender Buttons
- Of tiny pink dumbbells and fat chicks My tiny dumbbells are purple, but yes yes yes to all of this.
- NIU acquires noted sci-fi author manuscripts
- Expanded Alert at Writer Beware: American Book Publishing / Alexis Press / All Classic Books / Atlantic National Books
- Know what your rights are worth I love this so hard. It’s a breakdown of NPV from an author’s POV.
- From Mountains of Ice by Lorina Stephens, reviewed by Liz Bourke Sadly, no animated GIFs or interpretive dance.
- Writing Homework This might be a useful exercise for folks looking to expand their reviewing chops.
- Em Kwissa’s Dealings with Lulu.com Short version: Lulu.com pulls self-pubbed author’s memoir of growing up with an abuser–with all identifying information about her abuser elided within the text–because the abuser doesn’t like that Kwissa wrote a book about it.
- Mark O’Brien on DiversifYA
- This Article is About Me, and It’s About You, Too
- Enough with the ROI. Just follow your curiosity. (This is basically my philosophy of linkspam.)
- A Really Long Conversation About Fashion and Museums
- Maybe you get bad customer service because you’re a bad customer Is this where I can tell the story about the summer I worked at Target and it was horrible? And the one night a guy with an obsession about whether or not the mattress pad he was buying would fit the mattress and how it ended with me in tears at the register after he threw change at me because I dared to give him a Canadian quarter? I hope he got bedbugs.
- New post in Fran Wilde’s Cooking the Books series! Libations in Literature: Cooking the Books with Laura Anne Gilman. I love Gilman’s books, it was always awesome when I got one to review because I knew it was going to be both well-written and entertaining. And with awesome characters.
- Matchmaking Readers and Authors No. Reviewers are not part of the marketing machine. We are for readers, not authors.
- Then there’s this and I will straight up say that something smells funny about this whole thing and I am seriously annoyed that Salon accepted the idea that GoodReads is full of bullies more or less uncritically. I recognize that Howard may very well have seen comments that she found upsetting or abusive, however, she doesn’t mention that her partisans were also engaging in similar behavior (thanks, Brie!). And then Olivia K. Wilder has this to say and, well, I started hearing the Charlie Brown teacher voice about halfway through. There’s also a thread over at Absolute Write, too (thanks, Cyndy!).
What bugs about the Howard thing is how improbable the whole thing is. How likely is it that a debut self-pub author, who’s connected to readers and writers via social media, will be so ignorant about how GR ratings and shelves work? I know I’m being all conspiracy theory about this, but there is something seriously off about people’s reactions.
As usual, there are enough links here to keep me busy for some time. I love how 1 link leads to another article leads to a new website leads to another article and so on. I don’t know how you manage to find all of these, but keep it up, I love your linkspams.
@Las: I agree–something doesn’t feel right about the whole thing. I just can’t imagine that a debut self-pub author–who is going to rely on places like GR to help her sell her book–is so aggressively clueless about the whole thing.
@Andrea @ The Busy Bibliophile: I’m glad you enjoy them! I’m a compulsive reader so I’d be doing this much reading every week anyhow–having a place to compile things I find interesting makes me feel like it’s not all wasted time! 🙂
I think asking who reviews are for is an interesting question, actually, but not in the way that post framed it. Not in the sense of “are they for writer or are they for readers?”
As you said, reviews are for readers, not writers. Writing about a book in order to sell it is marketing, and I don’t really trust reviewers who think that’s part of their job. Just as I’d no longer trust Consumer Reports if they suddenly adopted the attitude that they tested cars to help out the car companies.
Beyond that though, I think the question of “which readers?” can be an interesting one. Also, I think that pondering this question might do some of those involved in various Goodreads dramas some good, if only because it might occur to some of them that different people use Goodreads differently AND THAT’S OK.