Your Happening World (October 8th through October 13th)

  • 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.

Your Happening World (September 22nd through September 24th)

  • Your Princess Is in Another Castle: Misogyny, Entitlement, and Nerds – The Daily Beast – Fixating on a woman from afar and then refusing to give up when she acts like she’s not interested is, generally, something that ends badly for everyone involved. But it’s a narrative that nerds and nerd media kept repeating.
  • #GameOverGate (with images, tweets) · strictmachine · Storify – Zoe Quinn blows #GamerGate wide open.
  • Timothy Snyder’s Lies | Jacobin – In Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, Hitler and Stalin are one and the same. And the partisans — Jewish fighters included — only encouraged German crimes.
  • Whirling Nerdish: Asthma and THE MIRROR EMPIRE – I’m particularly interested in how Hurley handles this character because all my life, I was told by movies and TV that people with asthma were nerds. They were geeks, dweebs, losers. Pathetic little wastes that fly into a wheezing, gasping fit when things get difficult while, meanwhile, the HERO goes and kicks the bad guys ass and handles his shit.
  • A few disjointed thoughts on other cultures and diversity in SFF – Aliette de Bodard – Researching another culture is freaking hard work, PLEASE do not undertake it lightly (and when I say “freaking hard work”, I don’t mean a few days on Wikipedia, or even a few days of reading secondary sources at the library). And PLEASE do not think you’ll be exempt of prejudice/dominant culture perceptions/etc. No one is.
  • Public Domain Super Heroes – Public Domain Super Heroes is a collaborative website about comic book, comic strip, film, literary, pulp, mythological, television, animation, folk stories, etc… Characters in the public domain fitting in genres such as the masked vigilante, caped crusader, villains, scientists, magicians, robots, jungle lord, and their supporting characters.
  • Pioneer winners — Butler: Thirteen Ways of Looking at the British Boom – “There certainly seems to be something of a boom. To a certain extent these things are always artefacts―there’s no objective criteria by which one can judge ‘boom-ness’ (boomitude? boomosity?―so the fact that everyone’s talking about it is to a certain extent definitional of the fact that something’s going on”