I’m always amused by spambots. At first they were all about the penis enlargement or prescription drugs and then they moved on to excessively complimenting me on the information I provided and assured me that they had bookmarked my blog for future perusal (a promise I can believe in given the frequency of our interactions) but now they’ve switched tactics: accusing me of privilege!
Does your comment improve upon the silence? Then why comment? I don’t understand? why you have to talk like you’re unhappy about the fact that this lecture isn’t catered to you or something. You should be grateful to even have this information available to you because people used to PAY in the past just to SIT and LISTEN, but some people just don’t comprehend because they’ve had life served to them on a platter.
Is this a sign that the bots are becoming aware of social justice? Trolling YouTube for hateful speech and giving them a what-for?
I may have marked you for deletion this time, Ms. Spam Bot of Intersectionality, but I am listening. Fight on.
It started with the first season. I thought they were constrained by adherence to the book and everything was just a bit… dull. Tyrion was worth watching, the wolves were pretty, and all the added scenes were excellent (the conversation between Robert and Cersei on the failures of their marriage was exquisite), but overall I just couldn’t work myself up to care. Continue reading →
In the future I may do a follow-up regarding deductions, in the meantime this is just a follow up with links to forms mentioned in the article itself. Continue reading →
This was pretty much the exact thing I needed in my Google Reader at the exact moment I needed it.
Patrick Rothfuss is starting up his annual charity drive for Heifer International which is, on the whole, completely awesome and fabulous and a beautiful example of someone starting something wonderful purely for the love of doing good. I really can’t say that enough: WorldBuilders is wonderful and does wonderful things. My friends and I have donated to this charity. It’s awesome.
Now that I have that out of the way, I’m having mixed feelings about this: The Literary Pin-Up Calendar. If I recall correctly, the pin-up calendar started last year mostly on a whim–Pat met the artist who had this beautiful thing and Pat thought ‘hey, I could make this happen.’ The calendar was filled with pin-ups inspired by classic authors like Nathaniel Hawthorne, etc. This year it’s current fantasy authors like N.K. Jemison, Neil Gaiman, other people whose first names start with letters other than N…
On the one hand, I think the calendar is interesting. Women are nice to look at and pin-ups have an interesting, retro aesthetic. In fact I own an entire book of Pin-Up art (it was on sale at Barnes & Noble). I am not opposed to beautiful pictures of beautiful women nor am I opposed to the combination of such things with some of my favorite authors.
It doesn’t help that every time I go to Facebook I learn that some new politician is trying to explain how women should just accept rape and any of its consequences. Or how my political decisions are completely determined by what time of the month it is.
None of that is Pat’s fault, of course. Or Lee Moyer’s. They made a beautiful thing because they like literature and women. I get that.
I just also feel a little sad about the state of genre too.
So like I said. I’m having mixed feelings. Complicated feelings. I wish the pin-ups had been more gender neutral–male and female. Or rather, more gender *inclusive* since we don’t all fit into those teeny, tiny check-boxes. I wish there’d been aliens and zoftig figures.
I wish that I could’ve seen the calendar for what it was intended to be, rather than a small footnote in a field which claims to be progressive, but sometimes really, really isn’t.
1. I don’t understand the point of this post. Seems to me that if you want to have a “reasonable discussion” about men and women in fandom, you should start by accurately representing the incident in question. I posted a long reply, but comments are screened and despite signing my name and being logged into Google (which uses my real name) my comment was not posted.
2. On a more positive note, my best friend Jessica linked me to this: Circle of 6 App which is designed to help prevent violence by enabling you to send out alert/help messages complete with your location with (I presume) only a few clicks.
3. Related, given the recent discussion of sexual harassment at conventions, I thought perhaps this app could be used to help out women who go to cons. I haven’t played around with the app yet (downloading now!) but it’d be nice if you could simply send out a quick message saying ‘help! Being cornered by creeper’ to six people at once. The difficulty, I imagine, would be in locating the person within a building–but at least the people could call right back giving the person in need a chance to use the phone as a way to extricate from the situation, or to discretely give location info so people can come help. Anyway, just a thought. Either way, seems a good thing to have on your phone.
ETA: Now that I’ve downloaded the app, I can tell you a couple more things:
You must have six people in your circle before you’re allowed to send a message. But you can add people more than once (I added my friend Jess 6 times so we could test it). Once your circle is done, you select the three emergency icons which will bring up a pre-written and addressed group text. The GPS coordinates are in latitude and longitude and click you through to Google Maps which is going to do nothing for floors/rooms but if you could sneakily add it in, then you can do so pretty easily when it brings up the page to send it. At the very least it alerts 6 (or however many) that you’re in need of assistance.
Comments will temporarily be disabled on this blog–by which I mean I’m still trying to get Jetpack Comments to work and the nice people at WordPress need me to leave it enabled so they can experiment. I apologize for the inconvenience. If you need to reach me, try Twitter or Email (helenabell AT gmail DOT com).
ETA: Jetpack comments have been disabled so you should be able to reply to posts now.
