Your Happening World (November 3rd)

  • Inktober 2014 – Imgur – A daily ink drawing of Reddit's movie title typos.
  • Guy writes chilling post about being a stalker – I would love to believe this is fiction (oh god, I so very much want this to be a really bad writing assignment or something) but he even tags the post as "Real Life". I can't. Brittain has absolutely no idea what he's done to this poor woman and casts himself as a downtrodden romantic hero instead of a deeply disturbing stalker. It's a frightening look at the mental hoops a stalker jumps through to rationalize their behavior.
  • Richard Brittain Violently Assaults Book Reviewer – In an update to the "Guy writes chilling post about being a stalker" story that I truly wish hadn't been real, Richard Brittain was arrested recently for tracking down a woman who panned his book, going to her workplace and beating her over the head with a bottle of wine.
  • The Complicated Appeal Of Black Metal – While black metal is considered to be by and for the deeply misanthropic — “true” black metal, by definition, is satanic — in the past decade its popularity has grown extensively, crossing over from die-hard “kvltists” to a centrist, mainstream indie-rock audience that would have never otherwise cared about a metal scene.
  • Kap nâh jòh!!! Haagse striptekenaar Marnix Rueb overleden!!! – Marco Raaphorst

Your Happening World (October 3rd through October 7th)

  • Where Should We Bury the Dead Racist Literary Giants? – The Awl – At the same time, focusing on race in Lovecraft can also lead to a greater appreciation of his work, and a better understanding of its horror. Joshi may think he's protecting Lovecraft's legacy by minimizing the role of race in his stories, but the truth is that, to the extent that Lovecraft is still meaningful, it's in large part because of his portrait of his own racism. Lovecraft isn't a great artist despite being a racist, as Joshi would have it. Nor is he a lousy artist because he's a racist, as Older says. He's a great artist and he's a racist: Lovecraft's world is one in which racism poisons everything, in which the fear of anyone who isn't white is so overwhelming that it fills the seas and the skies and everything in between with gibbering demons and cosmic despair. The bleak, clotted hatred with which he renders that world is precisely what makes his work valuable.
  • What to read on the Tory proposals for a “Bill of Rights” | Jack of Kent
  • GUEST POST: Of Meat Hooks and Desire by Max Gladstone | Brian Staveley – There’s more to life than stabbing people in the gut. Or melting their faces off with a fireball. Or being dropped out of a helicopter, or tortured with a potato peeler.
  • Fantasy-Faction World Tour of Wonderment: The Netherlands | Fantasy-Faction
  • Marvel & Jack Kirby Family Settle Long-Running Legal Dispute – Page 5 – So what happened wasn't that the Kirby family sued Marvel just because they one day decided to up and want more money. They didn't even sue. What they did was file for termination of copyright assignment — the very thing that the law allows creators to do. They didn't do this against the wishes of Kirby himself — Kirby had been all for doing it, ever since the law had been changed. But they had to wait a certain amount of time, and Kirby didn't live long enough to see it happen. But he was always on board with it.

Your Happening World (June 17th through June 18th)

Blog fodder for June 17th through June 18th:

  • The Abstinence Method – Modern Farmer – But the Netherlands’ success demonstrates this isn’t true. The country is tiny, but its livestock-raising is intensive and high-tech: 17 million people and about 118 million farm animals share a space only the size of Maryland, yet the Netherlands is Europe’s leading meat exporter. So if the Netherlands can reduce routine antibiotic use without harming its farmers’ survival, maybe other countries can, too.
  • BUTT THEN | Good Dogs
  • Jennifer in paradise: the story of the first Photoshopped image | Art and design | theguardian.com – In this way, Jennifer in Paradise became the first colour image used to demonstrate the software they had started to call Photoshop.
  • Silence is Complicity — The Radish. – I don’t know how we can make this right to the hundreds, if not thousands, of people who have been injured by our complicity in these horrors. And yes, I am including myself in this because I have been part of fandom for more than a decade now and I have not spoken loudly enough, if there is even one person still standing who thinks this is okay. Our community must become an unwelcome place for predators.
  • On doing a thing I needed to do – Janni Lee Simner / Desert Dispatches – I read and reread her daughter’s words this week. I read, too, portions of MZB’s own court deposition (from her husband’s trial, also for child abuse) that I hadn’t read before. Then yesterday I took a deep breath, and I added up the advances from my two Darkover sales, my Darkover royalties, and (at his request) my husband Larry Hammer’s payment for his sale to MZB’s magazine.

Your Happening World (June 12th through June 15th)

Blog fodder for June 12th through June 15th:

  • The Netherlands: Victory for Transgender Rights | Human Rights Watch – The law on transgender rights that the Dutch Senate approved on December 18, 2013, is an important step toward equality, Human Rights Watch said today. The new law will allow transgender people to change the gender marker in their official identity papers to their preferred gender. It does away with previous requirements for taking hormones and surgery, including irreversible sterilization, though it is a step short of complete personal autonomy for the decision.
  • On Telling the Truth – People of Color in European Art History – I’m sick and tired of suffering in silence. I’m sick of “keeping things civil”, and I’m tired of giving the benefit of the doubt to people who mean me nothing but ill. There is real violence happening to myself and other bloggers for more reasons than that people do not like what we have to say…people take exception to who we are, how we speak, what we look like, who we call friend, and who we call family. No one is obligated to justify their existence.
  • Holland’s World Cup win over Spain wasn’t the return of Total Football – Louis van Gaal has created something new – Telegraph – The 3-4-3 that Van Gaal played on Friday night was essentially a reactive formation designed to combat Spain’s dominant midfield. The wing-backs did not venture too far forward, and with midfielders Nigel De Jong and Jonathan de Guzman essentially screening the back three, Holland reverted to a 5-2-3, or even a 7-3, without the ball. And seeing as this was Spain, they were quite often without the ball.
  • Maliki’s most solemn hour — The Arabist – Just days ago, ISIS pushed forward from its safehouses and camps in the Nineveh Governorate, which it had won control over in the past months, to take over the city of Mosul. It has attacked several other cities in northern Iraq as well, and disrupted the siege that federal forces in Iraq brought against it and its allies in Al Anbar Governorate this Spring. Mosul was living under a state of siege with the government resorting to an air bridge due to the danger ISIS ambushes posed to highway traffic. The group has for over a year now been following a strategic campaign it dubbed "Soldier's Harvest": the aim has been to retake the territories lost by al Qaeda-aligned jihadists during the final years of the U.S. Occupation by terrorizing the local authorities into quitting the fight. ISIS would then fill the resulting vacuum caused by their retreat. "This started in rural sections of Iraq such as the desert regions of Anbar and the Hamrin Mountains that stretch across Diyala and Salahadd
  • Portugal indebted to Angola after economic reversal of fortune – "Portugal is in a tricky situation. It needs Angolan money and must also watch out for Portuguese residents in Angola," Filipe explains. About 100,000 Portuguese nationals currently live in the former colony. Much as with Brazil in the past, many young Portuguese, dogged by unemployment at home, see their future in Angola.