(1) TINGLE IN YOUR PACKET. Maybe this helps explain why the Hugo Voter Packet wasn’t released on May 23.
my story will have TWO WARNINGS in Hugo Awards packet, one for explicit content and one for spelling. Thank you. pic.twitter.com/oJPgfU3T0u
— Chuck Tingle (@ChuckTingle) May 26, 2016
(2) RUNAWAY TRAILER. The Hollywood Reporter analyzes “’Ghostbusters’: How Sony Plans to Out-Slime the Online Haters”.
When Sony Pictures’ second trailer for its female-fronted Ghostbusters reboot appeared online May 18, fans initially had to find it on Facebook. The studio had switched from YouTube, which hosted the first trailer, in a deliberate effort to combat a cacophony of negative reaction emanating from a very vocal minority online.
With the YouTube trailer, bloggers could embed the player on their sites to congregate negativity on Sony’s official YouTube channel, a move akin to spraying toxic green slime all over the studio. As a result, the Ghostbusters teaser was dubbed the most disliked trailer ever — not the kind of buzz Sony or director Paul Feig want just months before the $150 million comedy’s July 15 release.
Given the high stakes riding on the franchise reboot starring Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon, the studio was determined not to let the anti-Ghostbusters contingent mar the movie’s perception. “What tends to happen with a beloved property is the fanboy or the fangirl shows up and says, ‘How dare you remake this?’ ” says Sony domestic marketing president Dwight Caines.
But the umbrage taken has been even more pronounced than for the average reboot, and many believe it’s because Ghostbusters marks the first major film to get a female-centric redo (plans for others are in the works, from Ocean’s Eleven to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Gender politics is rearing its ugly head, some say, with even Donald Trump weighing in last year on Instagram: “Now they’re making Ghostbusters with only women. What’s going on?!”
To some extent, Sony was expecting negative reaction to the first trailer, which contained very few special effects scenes because they mostly weren’t ready. When the studio launched the first footage of Sam Raimi’s 2002 Spider-Man, it scored a 65 percent negative rating. For the 2012 reboot The Amazing Spider-Man, it was 60 percent negative. And Daniel Craig’s first James Bond film, Casino Royale, drew a 55 percent negative rating.
(3) TORCHWOOD. ScienceFiction.com tells about an audio reunion of the Torchwood stars.
Big Finish has been issuing new ‘Torchwood’ adventures and not only have the original actors been returning to provide their voices, but the stories are set before the third series ‘Children of Earth’ meaning that fan favorite Ianto Jones played by Gareth David-Lloyd is still alive in them.
Recently, Eve Myles, who played one of the show’s two focal characters Gwen Cooper announced she was retiring the role, but it appears she has one more go-round for the character. Myles will reunite with John Barrowman/Captain Jack Harkness, Kai Owen/Rhys Williams and David-Lloyd for the newest Big Finish miniseries ‘Torchwood: Outbreak’ which will be released as a three-part boxed set this November. Previously, the stars each headlined their own solo installments, except for Myles and Owen who appeared together in ‘Forgotten Lives’. But this will be the first time all four will participate together in one audio story.
(4) HUMBLE AT TWENTY-ONE. The Small Beer Press fiction HumbleBunde offers up to 21 books worth as much as $184.
Pay $1 or more for Meet Me in the Moon Room by Ray Vukcevich, Trash Sex Magic by Jennifer Stevenson, The Fires Beneath the Sea by Lydia Millet, Fire Logic by Laurie J. Marks, The Liminal People by Ayize Jama-Everett, Generation Loss by Elizabeth Hand, Tyrannia by Alan DeNiro, The Monkey’s Wedding and Other Stories by Joan Aiken, and Stranger Things Happen by Kelly Link. Pay more than the average price to also receive A Stranger in Olondria by Sofia Samatar, Couch by Benjamin Parzybok, Travel Light by Naomi Mitchison, The Entropy of Bones by Ayize Jama-Everett, Kalpa Imperial by Agelica Gorodischer, translated by Ursula K. Le Guin, Solitaire by Kelley Eskridge, and North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud.
Pay $15 or more for all of that plus Carmen Dog by Carol Emshwiller, The Child Garden by Geoff Ryman, Storyteller: Writing Lessons and More from 27 Years of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop by Kate Wilhelm, After the Apocalypse by Maureen F. McHugh, and Archivist Wasp by Nicole Kornher-Stace.
The bundle supports charities and buyers can direct where the money goes — between Small Beer Press, Worldreader, and, if you’d like, a second charity of your choice via the PayPal Giving Fund.
(5) SFWA HANGOUT. SFWA President Cat Rambo announced a new series of online chats.
Starting May 30 at noon Pacific time, every two weeks I’ll be hosting a chat on Google hangouts talking about what we’re doing, what’s coming up, recent issues and achievements, and the state of the industry overall. The chat will be broadcast live as well as recorded for the SFWA Youtube channel, and will feature a small group (4-5 people) of SFWA officials, staff, volunteers, members, and other visitors as appropriate each time.
Both SFWA members and non-members are encouraged to submit questions and comments for use on the show. You can submit them by mailing them to [email protected] or by posting them here.
(6) SWIRSKY GUESTS. At Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog, Rachel Swirsky has written a meditative memoir piece about painful moments where lives intersect with oppression.
(7) WHAT MADE THEM MAD. University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (JSMA) hosts “Aliens, Monsters, and Madmen: The Art of EC Comics” through July 10.
Aliens, Monsters, and Madmen celebrates the achievements of the most artistically and politically adventurous American comic-book company of the twentieth century: Bill Gaines’s Entertaining Comics, better known to fans all over the world as EC. Specializing in comic-book versions of popular fiction genres—particularly Crime, Horror, War, and Science Fiction—the company did far more than merely adapt the conventions of those genres to the comics medium. In the case of the now legendary Science Fiction and Horror titles, Weird Science and Tales from the Crypt, the creators at EC actively extended those genre conventions, while simultaneously shaping the imaginations of a subsequent generation of writers and filmmakers, such as Stephen King, George Lucas, John Landis, George Romero, and Steven Spielberg.
EC also broke new ground in the realm of satire as the publisher of MAD, an experimental humor comic that parodied the very stories that were elsewhere its stock in trade. EC Comics offered a controversial mix of sensationalism and social provocation, mixing titillating storylines and imagery with more overtly politically progressive material. Alongside comics about beautiful alien insect-women who dine on unsuspecting human astronauts, for example, they also tackled subjects that other popular media of the era avoided, including racism, corruption, and police brutality. As a result, the company attracted the disapproval of parents, politicians, and moralists everywhere, and was ultimately driven out of business as the result of a conservative “anti-comics” backlash in 1954. (Only MAD survived, by becoming a magazine in the mid-1950s; it remains in print today.)
The exhibition is curated by Ben Saunders, professor, Department of English. Saunders curated the JSMA’s previous comics exhibitions, Faster Than A Speeding Bullet: The Art of the Superhero (2009) and Good-Grief!: A Selection of 50 Years of Original Art from Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts (2012).
The JSMA is located on the University of Oregon Campus in Eugene.
(8) COOKE. Thomas Parker writes an appreciation of the late Darwyn Cooke at Black Gate – “Hope, Heroism, and Ideals Worth Fighting For: Darwyn Cooke, November 16, 1962 – May 14, 2016”
I was surprised and deeply saddened on May 14th to learn of the death from cancer of comic artist and writer Darwyn Cooke, at the much too early age of 53.
Over the past decade, I have gradually lost most of my interest in current comics, especially ones from DC and Marvel that deal with long established characters; the medium (always with some honorable exceptions, of course) has largely grown too violent, too jaded, too self aware and self indulgent to produce much work that engages me.
The shock for shock’s sake taboo breaking, the endless restarts and reboots, the universe-altering big events that promise to “change everything” — they all long ago began to merge together into one dull blur, like an old chalkboard that has been written on and erased too many times. How often can you really “change everything” before you are in danger of eradicating the ties of memory and affection and shared history that connect a medium and its audience? That’s what happened with me, anyway. What the hell — maybe I’m just getting old.
There are exceptions though, as I mentioned, and Darwyn Cooke was one of them. I was always eager to see anything he produced; when a new Cooke was in my hands, I felt as young as I did the day I bought my first comic book (House of Mystery 175, July-August, 1968).
(9) TODAY IN HISTORY
- May 25, 1953 – It Came From Outer Space premieres. Although credited to Harry Essex, most of the script, including dialogue, was copied almost verbatim from Ray Bradbury’s initial film treatment.
- May 25, 1977 — George Lucas’ Star Wars was released.
(10) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY BOY
- Born May 25, 1944 — Frank Oz (born Richard Frank Oznowicz), age 72.
(11) CONNECTIONS. On Twitter yesterday comedian and CNN United Shades of America host W. Kamau Bell mentioned that he and N.K. Jemisin are cousins together in Mobile, Alabama.
Here’s the Tweet. (And Jemisin dropped in with a couple of replies.)
So proud of my cousin! We were just 2 weird kids in Alabama talking about doing big things. https://t.co/emHiaO0Vxq https://t.co/cp1wuEX0R8
— W. Kamau Bell (@wkamaubell) May 24, 2016
Admittedly @nkjemisin's big thing was always to be a fantasy writer whereas mine at the time was to be bitten by a radioactive spider.
— W. Kamau Bell (@wkamaubell) May 24, 2016
(12) A HEARTFELT APOLOGY. From The Jimmy Kimmel show.
The most recent episode of “Game of Thrones” was particularly upsetting for fans of the show. Even now people are still talking about the shocking turn of events at the end of the show – and producers DB Weiss and David Benioff took the extraordinary step of apologizing to their fans.
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, and Marc Criley for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Ian P.]
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@Stevie, I’ve thrown a buck at the bundle just for the Joan Aiken book, I don’t think she ever wrote anything remotely dystopian.
@Ray Better to have one set of rules that trigger meanness than two or more sets of contradictory rules that trigger meanness from different people.
Probably worth mentioning that impossible double-standards are one of the most common forms of social control precisely because they keep everyone vulnerable to “directed meanness”. Standards of masculinity and (especially) femininity are the classic example, but you’ll find them everywhere people are told it couldn’t have been that bad if they didn’t speak up and labelled as attention-seeking professional victims when they do.
The book bundle contains some of my favorite works in all the world (Fire Logic and The Child Garden), but I’m afraid I would not call them cheerful works with minimal angsting. In fact, The Child Garden is kind of like drinking straight shots of concentrated depression. The works in the bundle I am most familiar with could actually all be said to be about characters who start in a very bleak place overcoming that bleakness and rising above it, but the fact remains that Fire Logic, Solitaire, The Child Garden, and Archivist Wasp all start in pretty bleak places.
But that’s only a few works out of many, so it doesn’t necessarily characterize them all.
That bundle is so worth picking up. I’ve read the Eskridge, Hand, Jama-Everett, Link, Marks, Samatar, Stevenson, and Vukcevich and would buy this bundle just to have those on my device for re-reading. Really looking forward to the Aiken, Ballingrud, Gorodischer (wait, Le Guin is doing translations now? fabulous!), and Mitchison. Oh wait, there’s a bonus too, with even more good stuff.
For anyone who doesn’t have Facebook, here’s the blog post talking about the upcoming SFWA Chat Hour: http://www.kittywumpus.net/blog/2016/05/26/science-fiction-and-fantasy-writers-news-sfwa-chat-hour-debuting-may-30-2016-noon-pacific-time/. For the love of Glob, please ask some questions so it’s not just Bud, Kate, Maggie, and I nattering away about how much fun we had at the Nebulas. We’ve got a holy crapton (specialized F&SF term) of cool stuff coming in the next six months. (Maybe if you requested a certain wombat, we could get her on an upcoming one of these.)
@Stevie: Of the ones I’ve read, neither Generation Loss nor A Stranger in Olondria could be described as angst-free, although they’re both great books*. Note also that Hand’s novel, despite some weirdness around the edges, is basically straight-up crime fiction.
And for the love of Cthulhu, don’t read the Ballingrud in your current mood. He’s an amazing writer, but bleak doesn’t even begin to describe it.**
*Samatar’s book won a bunch of awards, and deserved all of them.
**I really admired North American Lake Monsters, but there’s one story in that collection I almost wish I hadn’t read.
I was hoping for an online reference I could follow for his factoid about the Puritans, not a link to his review of a 900 page book. I learned in history class that they had sex before marriage all the time but it was not considered too bad as long as the couple were courting and married soon after. Also, premarital pregnancy rates will be lower in any society where people marry at 16 instead of 30.
Now I am not saying that Puritan rates of out-of-wedlock pregnancy were high, only that I want to see the study that shows that they were low solely because of public shaming as Alexander writes in his blog.
In that opening section, everything between
and
are things that commenters, or hypothetical commenters, say to him. He’s not himself asserting that the Puritans had a premarital pregnancy rate near zero because they publicly shamed anyone who departed from their moral standards. He’s saying this is the kind of argument that could be made for shaming.
World Weary:
I don’t have my sources to hand, but a few months ago I did some research on family structures in Puritan SE England in the early 17th Century. (This is, of course the area and population from which the Puritan colonies of New England were drawn.)
Pre-marital sex: wasn’t technical “pre-marital”, as betrothal was considered legally binding, and the church ceremony did not have the sacramental importance that we might suppose – particularly as many puritan congregations disliked the prayerbook and were regularly in dispute with Anglican-leaning ministers. Judging by the dates of marriage and baptism in those registers that survive, pregnancy was often the occasion for undergoing the church ceremony, which would reduce the incident of birth outside marriage even further.
Age of marriage: this one surprised me. The majority of couples married in their early twenties, not in their teens.
Family size: even allowing for higher rates of infant death, the birth rate within marriage was low. While there were undoubtedly many large families, the average family in the study I was reading was – 2 adults, 2 children!
Illegitimate births: were surprising low in the 17th century, and lower in puritan congregations than non-puritan parishes. This may have been due to shaming, but I wonder, in light of the overall birthrate, if this wasn’t as much a result of one of the features of sexual culture and practise in this era; a preference for mutual masturbation rather penetration (as described with enthusiastic frequency by Mr Pepys in his diary).
@Ray
This is only true if the one set of rules is internally consistent, and impossible for different people (or the same person with different goals) to interpret in different ways.
The “If you have, you’re a slut. If you haven’t you’re a prude. It’s a trap” quote pops inexplicably to mind.
women Let’s be honest about who pays the price for this.
I can’t help but wonder if he also thinks it is better because it hardly ever happens to men. And perhaps what he really opposes is people pointing out the double standard of sexual behavior every time it rears its ugly head?
Which leads to shaming the unpopular, right? Shaming, for example, people promoting atheism but not people promoting Christianity. Are we sure we like the way this works out?
This just strikes me as the policy of the top dog. I haven’t actually seen him turn this into “how dare you be intolerant about my intolerance…” Perhaps I am completely misjudging his character on the basis of a single post and he would never do such a thing. But you do see it could easily turn that direction, right?
And would posting such doubts be considered “shaming” him? Because the other double standard that I see pop up elsewhere is that very light criticism can be labeled shaming and shaming can be labeled free speech. So there’s that.
JR & others:
A great source for this kind of info is “Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America” by David Hackett Fischer. (link to “prenuptial” in Albion’s Seed.)
Marriage age: our ideas about marriage age in the past tend to be based on the uppermost classes of royalty & aristocracy, where women were married very young. Most of northern Europe (and America) most of the time followed a unique system known as the “Western European marriage pattern”, in which most women married for the 1st time in their twenties (or later!), and a high proportion (often 10% or more) never married at all. This went along with a system where most people, male or female, left home in their teens to work as servants or hired workers.
In the US, the 1950s was the period when marriage age was *lowest*, it was not the most traditional period at all.
Thank you to everyone who responded; I have taken advantage of this amazingly good book deal, and, due to the magic of screen shotting, have a list of stuff I’d do best to avoid at the moment.
I love Tingle’s approach to content warnings; that by itself has brightened my day…
@Doctor Science
Interesting, I’ll check that source out.
It seems as if the indenture system, by which both girls and boys were trained as servants or journeymen, living as part of their master’s household in their teens, would not only delay marriage, but also lead to the smaller households on the 17th Century; young people met and married people while living at a distance from the parental household, and tended to settle in their adopted parishes, rather than forming the extended, multi-generational families of popular imagination.
As is often the case about historical sociological trends, patterns of marriage (age, age-differential, pre-marital sex attitudes) varied much more than popular imagination allows for. A really great collection of papers exploring this topic through the filter of the status of “single women” is:
Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250-1800
I’ve summarized the contents from the point of view of my Lesbian Historic Motif Project. One good introduction is the demographic survey.
So many ways to be one of the Lucky 10,000 today. No time for fiction off learning real history.
Scott Alexander… my memory for names of blog writers I don’t read regularly is woefully porous. But don’t I remember seeing a link sometime last year to a long whiny post by him about how women caused all his problems in high school and so they owed him sex now? Or have I conflated him with someone else?
I thought that scroll title looked familiar…
Currently ripping the DVD box set I just bought (makes watching it easier) of little known BBC 70’s series The Omega Factor. Can’t remember where I saw it mentioned originally but have been meaning to pick it up and watch for some time.
Synopsis is very X-Files crossed with Stross’s Laundry: Journalist Tom Crane (James Hazeldine) discovers he has psychic powers and is recruited by secret government organization Department 7. Along with his colleague Anne Reynolds (Louise Jameson) Tom investigates the bizarre and unexplained in their search for the mysterious Omega Factor.
Only ran for one season and has never been repeated after running afoul of the then powerful National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association. Explaining the two quotes on the cover.
“Tightly Scripted, Well Imagined… Remarkably Convincing” Richard Last, Daily Telegraph
“Thoroughly Evil” Mary Whitehouse, NVLA
@JR Lawrence
Those patterns then seems to be very similar to 16th century England… which really shouldn’t be surprising. We’re at the time where England is pretty “full”, with marginal land under cultivation and bulging towns. I’m not surprised that, you see people married in their twenties and having kids latter, and not so many of them.
There’s also the trend that, while the Puritans and Anglicans are pretty damned sexist by today’s standards, they were for the time “progress.” The woman’s rule in the home was considered quite important, the wife had some authority when compared to some other cultures or previous times (And strictly that.). It’s easy to laugh at now, considering how otherwise awful they were – but the low numbers of children speak to a greater level of autonomy of the two domestic partners, that would sadly be lost further down the line.
And additional speculation is well, birth control is pretty primitive, and people are pretty sexual. The cause of this late child bearing has been speculated, with a fair amount of evidence to have been… Tingle-y.
@IanP: ah, yes, The Omega Factor, I remember it well. Had its ups and downs, but was basically a good one. The Daily Telegraph, reviewing the final episode, called the series “an uneven but worthwhile piece of occasional originality”, which is high praise for a genre show, from that source.
[Checks in on thread after work.]
[Reads thread.]
[Quietly backs out of thread, goes off to read the newly acquired ebooks.]
Dammit, people, you’ve talked me into adding 21 more books to Mount TBR I don’t have time for this!
Also, historically people have generally postponed marriage until they could support a family. That gives a low marriage age in areas and periods with available farmland or jobs in the city, and higher ages in periods with little available farmland. To some extent this mechanism also controls population growth, since a high marriage age – for women at least – means fewer years as married and fertile, meaning fewer children. At least as long as sex before marriage is restricted.
On the other hand, the earliest studies that can be called “sociological research” from 19th century Norway – which consisted of a priest mailing out surveys to his colleagues with questions about life and traditions in their parish – suggests that in some areas up to 30% of brides where pregnant in the wedding.
Lee on May 26, 2016 at 11:15 am said: “Scott Alexander… my memory for names of blog writers I don’t read regularly is woefully porous. But don’t I remember seeing a link sometime last year to a long whiny post by him about how women caused all his problems in high school and so they owed him sex now? Or have I conflated him with someone else?”
Perhaps Scott Adams of Dilbert fame?
The Red Planet in the Red Woods
https://youtu.be/5qb-9K3lMGk
A night time lapse of the sky last night from where we’re staying in the Santa Cruz mountains.
> “Or have I conflated him with someone else?”
You might be thinking of Scott Aaronson. (Although the post I’m thinking of wasn’t exactly what you said; it blamed feminism for his high school social anxiety.)
I haven’t seen this mentioned here, though I may have missed it, but Weighing Shadows by Lisa Goldstein is currently on sale at Amazon for Kindle at $1.99. I would happily read her grocery list, so I bought it immediately.
Robert Reynolds: I rushed off and bought it.
Daniel Enness says his Castalia House blog posts won’t be in the voter packet — https://file770.com/?p=29176
Is there any way for me to read the kindle version of “Weighing Shadows” on my kobo?
Johan P:
historically people have generally postponed marriage until they could support a family.
This is actually not true for people generally. The whole reason this is called the Western European marriage pattern is because it’s unusual in a world context. It took a surprisingly long time for anthropologists & sociologists to realize how anomalously late most women marry in Western culture, because so much cultural knowledge is based on customs of royalty & aristocracy.
Currently, there’s a lot of work going on about the consequences of the WEMP, especially for the industrial revolution. Unlike in other societies, early industrialists in Western Europe had a potential workforce of women who were used to working away from home.
Lee: Scott Alexander… my memory for names of blog writers I don’t read regularly is woefully porous. But don’t I remember seeing a link sometime last year to a long whiny post by him about how women caused all his problems in high school and so they owed him sex now? Or have I conflated him with someone else?
I’m pretty sure that you’re thinking of Scott Aaronson. Though Scott Alexander weighed in on that, and I’m not sure that it’s a whole lot better.
One of the things that seem to make it hard for some white men to accept that they are privileged is that, in this sense, “privilege” doesn’t necessarily mean the presence of something (money, fame, powerful job, fancy house, flash car, women falling all over you, etc).
So there are lots of objections along the lines of “but look how hard my life has been! I’m not privileged!”.
In this sense, privilege is the absence of something, simply because you’re not female or POC: the absence of having your resume tossed by the reviewer; the absence of being talked to like you’re a moron and cheated into a higher cost and unnecessary work when you take your car in to be repaired; the absence of having what you say in a business meeting be dismissed, or talked over, or taken credit for, by someone else; the absence of not being considered for promotion because of your gender or race, the absence of not being subjected to racist or sexist treatment and slurs.
This is why I think the use of the word “privilege” for this concept was not a good choice: because people tend to think of it in the traditional sense of getting something extra, rather than of not having something taken away, simply for being female or POC — and then right away you get the defensiveness about how they can’t possibly be privileged, because they’re not being given anything extra.
@ Doctor Science:
I don’t know the answer to your question, but Amazon has a free app called Kindle For PC which you can download and read Kindle books with and I think there’s software which converts files from one format to another.
Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful, though I’m sure other people here know the answer better than I do. Best of luck to you.
Well … Amazon sells the book with DRM, and to convert it to epub you must first crack the DRM. That’s possible, and the instructions are googlable, but it’s a bit tricky to set up and probably violates copyright law wherever you live.
Despite the efforts the efforts of the powerful in the US, it is not illegal to break DRM and format shift for personal use in many countries. It’s probably breaking the user’s terms of the agreement with Amazon, however – if you care about that.
In my experience, the setup is straightforward if you have a PC to do the conversion, but I don’t know the current level of hassle in getting a deDRM’d ePub on to a kobo.
JJ
Privilege is a notoriously tricky word; Scalzi’s reboot as ‘lowest difficulty setting did, I think, make a difference to some straight white males in the way they view the world, but left a large number of them still outraged that their suffering wasn’t recognised by all around them.
I wish I had some better way of communicating the fact that privilege varies greatly in context. I’m a straight white woman with severe health problems, fortunate to live in a country where medical treatment is free at the point of use, educated at a school founded by radical feminists in the 19th century, which enabled me to go to a good university and get a well paid job. I retired early, in order to spend more time with my doctors, but I had, and have, a decent pension; I also have an appartment worth around $1.4 million*. I bought it, and paid for it, with my salary; nobody subsidised me, but without all those people who went before me and made it possible for me to get that job it wouldn’t have happened.
That worth is meaningless because it’s my home; I have absolutely no desire to sell it, because it’s my home. Nevertheless, I am highly privileged, though I would have been even more privileged had I been healthy, and yet more so if I were a guy.** Of course, my tolerance level for trust fund babies is notoriously low because, with the help of those who went before me, I earned what I possess.
In turn my daughter has earned what she possesses, which, at the moment, is not much in monetary terms, but of very great value to the people she manages to haul out from under the wheels of the proverbial ten ton truck.
If you were in deep, deep shit then you would want someone like her leading the resuscitation team; as long as there is a you to get back she would keep trying, just as she would not stick something which used to be a human being on life support so she could feel good about it. I’m not sure it’s possible to convey those ethics to people who don’t understand that it makes me feel good isn’t a justification for doing something.
*Property prices in central London are insane.
**I was the first ever woman to take on a job in the City of London previously reserved for guys, presumably because they thought that women couldn’t deal with numbers with lots of 000s on the end. At the end of the first year, having very successfully dealt with numbers with lots and lots of 000s on the end, I thought that people would concede that they were wrong about women’s abilities. I was wrong. They explained it away by asserting that I have a man’s brain…
@Stevie
“They explained it away by asserting that I have a man’s brain…”
In a jar, perhaps?
I don’t know the current level of hassle in getting a deDRM’d ePub on to a kobo.
I have non-DRM’d ePubs on my Kobo – they never had any DRM – and it’s very simple: copy them from the hard drive to the reader.
Lauowolf
Oddly enough I did enquire where they thought I was keeping it.
All things considered it’s just as well this happened before the zombie apocalypse…
@andyl: Thanks. I’ll have to look into it further. Basically (as I attempted to say snarkily but maybe failed) I’m looking for no Gwen and Rhys. 😉 Jack alone is good too.
@Stevie: Same here; being American I am closer to dystopia than you.
@Everyone: “John Z. Upjohn” is Tweeting from WisCon and as usual, Alexandra Erin is painfully on the money with her Puppy parody.
@JJ–
I’ve had the ‘privilege’ discussion both with friends and on-line when I’ve tried to make the point that the word itself is a loaded one.
On-line someone was bemoaning the fact that some group wasn’t facing their ‘white privilege’ (I think it was something about rural and small town attitudes) and I tried to get them to see that telling someone they’ve got this ‘privilege’ when they have to decide between the electric bill and groceries is bound to fail and will only throw up a wall.
It’s unfortunate that in this day and age people still try to justify things with sexist concepts like man’s brain and lady brain.
@Doctor Science
1. You’ll need something to strip the DRM first on your desktop & the Calibre program to convert the eBook to ePub or PDF
2. Most recent article i found in a Google search pointed to here. I know this is a little later than you hoped, but I hope this helps.
On a completely unrelated note I think I should thank you for contributing to my discovery of fic. Well, it was the Hugo’s, reading the discussions here, a good friend, and you who all provided fuel. So, thank you! (I’ve been having a blast).
John Z. Upjohn @hymenaeushouse
WisSched app has a picture of a rocket ship on it. Time was you could tell what an app would be like if it has an icon like that. #wiscon40
John Z. Upjohn @hymenaeushouse
The con hasn’t even started and already I am disgusted by how these liberals prejudge everything. They all generalize everything.
John Z. Upjohn @hymenaeushouse
First impression of #wiscon40: these rainbow haired feminist sure get upset when a man dares to try to hold the door for them
John Z. Upjohn @hymenaeushouse
Update to previous: turns out it was a revolving door. # wiscon40
@Cat Rambo: A problem is that a measurable percentage of your potential audience might still be at a con during your Hangout! Or straggling home from one. So don’t be too discouraged if you don’t get the response you want this time. I’m probably going to be watching a panel that a Filer’s on at that very time. But if I’m instead hiding in the hotel room and looking at the net, I wouldn’t mind hearing more about the Nebulas! I really want to see a good version of “Radio SFWA”, and hear Hodgman’s opening.
@Doctor Science: Seconding “Albion’s Seed”. SUCH a good book. I did a report on it for my college US history class.
“Weighing Shadows” is really, really good (it was on my longlist) so buy it while it’s cheap.
Thanks to all for the reports on level of grim in this week’s bundle.
John C. Upjohn is hilarious.
“He” also sounds exactly like James May. Have the two of them ever been seen together?
(snicker)
@ David, Kyra, JJ: Scott Aaronson is the one I was thinking of, although that rape-justifying post from Scott Adams sure is… something. What, I won’t say. Three points is a small dataset, but honestly, what IS it with guys named Scott A.?
I don’t think I’ve ever read Lisa Goldstein, but I grabbed that on the basis of y’all’s recommendations. I’m a bit less than half way through book two of the God Stalk series (I prefer to call it that for now), but I’m hoping to get to Goldstein soon.
If you have a PC and you run windows it is pretty easy to use Calibre to strip the DRM off of your Amazon purchases. Google “dedrm plugin” and you should quickly find help.
@Harold Osler
I’ve tried using rights you take for granted but I’m not sure it’s made any difference in discussions I have with anyone other than my husband. I am trying to use less loaded terms but it’s like relearning English and doesn’t necessarily make a difference as people hear the loaded term I didn’t say.
I was meh on Weighing Shadows and I’m usually a Goldstein fan. But I seem to be the exception.
@Tasha–
The best we came up with on the fly was ‘advantages’ but that has it’s own issues.
You really need a couple of sentences to get your ideas across. Or a lot of sentences to be clear.
I’m thinking it’s a long-term discussion that really only works with people you already know
@Harold Osler I’m thinking it’s a long-term discussion that really only works with people you already know
Those are the ones I’m having the hardest time with. But I agree. Random internet strangers are probably not the right people to grab and have these discussions with,
Harold Osler: I’m thinking it’s a long-term discussion that really only works with people you already know
I had this discussion a while back on Facebook with a Friend of my cousin’s who posted a ranting comment on one of my cousin’s posts, complaining that he’d been told to “check your privilege” — of course, decrying how difficult his life has been and how dare anyone accuse him of having “privilege”!
I posted pretty much the same as what I posted above. Silence for a bit. Then he came back and said, “I’m not going to apologize for the fact that my resume isn’t being thrown in the trash because I’m white and male!”
And I responded, “No one is expecting you to apologize for that. What people would like you to do is just recognize that this is something where you don’t experience the same disadvantages as people who are female or POC. That is what they mean when they talk about ‘white male privilege’.”
He never responded to that — but my hope is that it at least gave him something to think about. 😐