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- Like the Ancient Romans « LRB blog – The trend may be as old as professional football, but it has recently increased ad absurdum, so that very few successful clubs can claim their success has anything to do with the character or qualities of the localities whose names they take. It’s all down to the international capitalists who own them, or dominate them with lucrative TV contracts. (The rot really set it, as with so many rots, with Rupert Murdoch.) Most Premier League players now are highly talented and obscenely paid foreigners.
- Non-Disney, Non-Pixar, Non-Ghibli Animated Films list –
- Action Women Movie Montage on Vimeo –
- Approaching Pavonis Mons by balloon: Asimov’s Science Fiction – February 2015 – Reading this piece, I was struck by the sense – which I think has also been articulated by Gardner Dozois – that we're starting to see the emergence of what you might call the "New Default Future". Bear's world is one of vanishing privacy, information for all, continued social inequality, climate change as a given, radical lifestyle changes effected by new biotechnology. You can tweak the parameters a bit, but it does seem as if writers are once again beginning to converge on a shared sense of the future. No, it doesn't necessarily involve space colonies or rolling roads or flying cars, but it's no less valid, no less fascinating.
- Frankie Boyle – Offence and Free Speech – So now a lot of challenging stuff just doesn't get made. Good stuff that does get made is weaker because it has to contain the seeds of its own defence. Because when the baleful burning eye of journalism turns upon you, you want to be able to say that it was all completely defensible. Nobody wants to be stood on the doorstep in their dressing gown saying "Well, actually it was supposed to be thorny and ambiguous and disturbing. I know it didn't please people, but actually I was trying not to please them." to a bored reporter from the Daily Mail who in their head is already translating your play about right to die legislation into a call for disabled death camps.
- Why I have resigned from the Telegraph | openDemocracy – This brings me to a second and even more important point that bears not just on the fate of one newspaper but on public life as a whole. A free press is essential to a healthy democracy. There is a purpose to journalism, and it is not just to entertain. It is not to pander to political power, big corporations and rich men. Newspapers have what amounts in the end to a constitutional duty to tell their readers the truth.
- I read only non-white authors for 12 months. What I learned surprised me | Sunili Govinnage | Comment is free | The Guardian – I wanted to do the same for people of colour. I feel as if my decision brought home just how white my reading world was. For whatever the reason and context, it took me until I was 30 years old to learn that Octavia E. Butler existed – how embarrassing!
- Feminist Frequency • One Week of Harassment on Twitter – Ever since I began my Tropes vs Women in Video Games project, two and a half years ago, I’ve been harassed on a daily basis by irate gamers angry at my critiques of sexism in video games. It can sometimes be difficult to effectively communicate just how bad this sustained intimidation campaign really is. So I’ve taken the liberty of collecting a week’s worth of hateful messages sent to me on Twitter. The following tweets were directed at my @femfreq account between 1/20/15 and 1/26/15.
- Guest Blog: Imagining Future Africa: Sci Fi, Innovation & Technology. | CONNECT/ZA –
- The Daily Targum :: Neither man nor woman: life as a non-binary student – On the bottom of my column, I use the pronoun “they.” This isn’t a typo, despite what many writers at The Guardian and Telegraph assumed as they reported on my Trigger Warning activism. Indeed, I do not identify as a man, the gender I was assigned at birth. I identify as a non-binary student.
- From the Heart of Europe – Refugees of Casablanca –
- The First Female Gamers – Could it really have been so unthinkable to Gygax that a woman would purchase Dungeons & Dragons? His game went on to wild, unprecedented popularity, and women constituted no small part of its long-term audience. To appreciate the situation in 1974, we must understand the market Dungeons & Dragons entered, and the curious consumer group it targeted: gamers.
- Retired NSA Technical Director Explains Snowden Docs – Well, they participate in the parallel reconstruction. So, in other words, when you can't use the data, you have to go out and do a parallel construction, means you use what you would normally consider to be investigative techniques, go find the data. You have a little hint, though. NSA is telling you where the data is, it makes you look really good. If you have it quickly. So then you can justify, taking it into court and use that in court. And so I call that perjury. In fact, I call this a 'Planned Program Perjury Policy' run by the Department of Justice of the United States. And, it's not just affecting our democracy, it's subverting our entire court system. It's not only subverting ours, it's subverting everybody's in the world that has a relationship with the FBI or the DEA. So this is infecting entire democracies, all of the world.