- I was there when a lesbian pride march got picketed by bigots | Another angry woman – It was clear that they were not here as fellow lesbians, which was evidenced by the fact that they did not participate in the march itself. They just showed up to try and wreck the event. I consider their intervention an act of lesbophobic violence.
- » Lesbians protesting a lesbian pride march for being inclusive. Hypocrisy thy name is TERF – Hilariously the “boycott” actually happened in the form of six TERFs holding up placards when everyone was marching, waiting until Sarah got off stage from her speech and then singing misogynistic chants and blogging about how they chased Sarah off stage.
- DRM Removal Tools for eBooks | Apprentice Alf’s Blog –
- Joe Sacco’s WWI drawings, in the Paris Metro –
- VK2014: Proper geframed naar de stembus » Apache.be – Dat was deze keer niet anders. Hoe trachtten de partijen zichzelf te framen met het oog op de stembusslag van zondag? Welke rol speelden de reguliere media daarbij? Wat betekenen de sociale media? En valt er nog wat te halen via klassieke huisbezoeken, affichecampagnes en het afschuimen van markten en braderieën?
Your Happening World
Your Happening World (June 27th)
- The Transformers and the Middle Ages – Having been a boy of a certain age in the 1980s, I was one of the many, many fans of the cartoon show The Transformers (confession – I still watch the show on occasion, and have a collection of the toys in a box in my basement). Now, as the fourth live-action Transformers film hits the screens, I want to take you back to when the Autobots and Decepticons went medieval!
- Sibilant Fricative: Ian Watson, Mana (Lucky’s Harvest, 1993; The Fallen Moon, 1994) – I’ve been holding back writing about Watson’s two Mana books, for reasons to do with that mode of debilitation called ‘but where to start?’ Given my peculiar academic background, and the topic of my PhD, excuse me if I open with a completely left field comparison to Robert Browning. A critic once described Pauline, Paracelsus and Sordello as like ‘three dragons, guarding the entrance to the gold of Browning’s mid-career poetry’. You see what he means: however much you enjoy ‘My Last Duchess’ and ‘Andrea Del Sarto’, you know that you can’t get a proper sense of Browning’s work without tackling the three brontosaur-sized texts with which he commenced his career.
- Britain’s Nuke-Proof Underground City – The Daily Beast – As the world held its breath during the Cold War, England built a top-secret underground city to save its government in case of nuclear attack. For half a century, "Burlington" lay ready.
- Is Ann Leckie the Next Big Thing in Science Fiction? | Riverfront Times – The Nebula, Arthur C. Clarke and Hugo awards are the Triple Crown of science-fiction writing. If Ancillary Justice claims the Hugo, it will become the first novel to win all three. After years toiling in obscurity, Leckie's given up trying to wrap her mind around how quickly she and her gun-slinging, galaxy-traversing heroine, Breq, have climbed to critical and popular adoration.
- Trinity: The Black Fantasy. – But who could blame Harmony? What black woman wouldn’t envy Storm? Storm had no need of relaxers or sunny Saturdays spent beneath the searing metal of her grandmother’s pressing comb. She never sat patiently while a beautician sewed blonde ringlets to her head to hide her tightly woven brown cornrows from view. Her hair was naturally straight. Her hair was naturally light. She was born conforming to the majority of our society’s beauty norms. She was born not looking like all the other little black girls. And because of that, she was lauded as beautiful. Because of how not black she appeared to be.
Your Happening World (June 22nd through June 24th)
Blog fodder for June 22nd through June 24th:
- The War Nerd: Like it or not, what’s happening in Iraq right now is part of a rational process | PandoDaily – I just wish Americans would stop assuming every place is like us. Let me tell you, for a Sunni Kurd to say, “I have Shia friends, I have Christian friends” is about as brave and radical as it gets, short of suicide, in the Middle East. I never heard any of my Saudi students say anything remotely like it. Well, how could they? By law, Shi’ism and Christianity are banned in the Kingdom. So they didn’t have the opportunity, even if they’d had the mindset (which they didn’t).
- Genre needs a lot more cruel and nasty reviews | Damien G. Walter – We need writers and reviewers like Priest who have the expertise and willingness to reflect back the problems in modern genre fiction. Because the problems are very real. Violence of the flattened, meaningless kind Priest pinpoints in Barricade is endemic in the genre.
- Editor’s blog: I am sexist • Eurogamer.net – This is a realisation that has slowly dawned on me over the last few years. Without really meaning to do so, I have been going around saying and doing things that demean women and casually downplay the importance of issues of gender discrimination all my life. It's a horrible thing to recognise about yourself, gradually or not. I try to be a generous and caring person and I am pretty sensitive, so the idea that I have been ignorantly treating half of the people I know and love in this way makes me feel awful.
- Tony Blair, dread creature of the forbidden swamp | Idiot Joy Showland – Tony Blair rises every couple of months, like a bubble of swamp gas. First there’s an uneasy buried rumbling, then small tremors shake the surface, and then suddenly he bursts through, a gassy eruption stinking of farts and sulphur. It doesn’t matter how many rounds you fire into his shambling frame; he just won’t die. Whenever something unpleasant happens in the Middle East, whenever some huge corporation is discovered to be starving people to death or poisoning them through calculated negligence, whenever the chaos of the international order reaches a starts to wobble into another death-spiral, a damp wind blows through a graveyard somewhere in England and Tony Blair emerges from his tomb.
- WW2 Drawings –
Your Happening World (June 19th through June 22nd)
Blog fodder for June 19th through June 22nd:
- Arcfinity – We’re reading BARRICADE by Jon Wallace – In case you are thinking otherwise, I was not scouring the text for these solecisms, setting out to set you up, but like all people who are preparing a review I was keeping notes throughout the reading. The protocols around a first novel by a young writer do matter. I kept noting all the bad stuff (much more than reported here), but I was looking for good bits with which to try to encourage you. I found none. It gradually dawned on me that I was wasting my time. Barricade was unyielding in its awfulness. It was a book I did not wish to write about.
- Tomgram: Rebecca Solnit, The Archipelago of Arrogance | TomDispatch – Yes, guys like this pick on other men's books too, and people of both genders pop up at events to hold forth on irrelevant things and conspiracy theories, but the out-and-out confrontational confidence of the totally ignorant is, in my experience, gendered. Men explain things to me, and other women, whether or not they know what they're talking about. Some men.
- Lesbian Historic Motif Project at The Rose Garden – My goal here — beyond the selfish utilitarian aspect of organizing my research — is much in parallel with that of sites like the Medieval People of Color blog, or Kameron Hurley's award-nominated essay "We Have Always Fought". I want to help change the unexamined assumptions about the place and nature of lesbian-like characters in historic fact, literature, art, and imagination. I want to do it to help other authors find inspiration and support for the stories they want to tell. And I want to do it to affect the reception of my own writing.
- All Quacked Up: Steve Gerber, Marvel Comics, and Howard the Duck « The Hooded Utilitarian – This article is a history of the editorial and business relationship between Marvel Comics, their representatives, and the late writer Steve Gerber (1947-2008). Its focus is their dealings over Howard the Duck, Gerber’s signature character.
- Ptak Science Books: Ueber-Spectacular Understatement Department: the Happy Post-Apocalyptic America and the “Awkwardness” of Holocaust, 1962 – How rich we'd all be after the bombs dropped!
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.