brown_betty: Neil Gaiman is decent, I don't contest.
brown_betty /: I just feel like he cheats in writing. He grabs the big, id-button ideas and leans on them. It's like playing Hallelujah on a pipe organ. You don't have to be good, you're playing Hallelujah on a pipe organ.
brown_betty: Which, I mean, hey, go for it! I like pipe organs, and Hallelujah. I just don't think it necessarily makes you good.
karenhealey: Well, comparatively, Miller is playing The Song That Never Ends on a kazoo
brown_betty: *cackles* Okay, you have beat me at my own metaphor!

Does anyone else reinstall their OS under stress? I don't do it on purpose, I just seem to always find myself reinstalling my operating system as a sort of soothing tonic whenever my life descends into chaos.

My Aunt is in town and came to me for tech support, as does most of my family, but this one is definitely outside my sphere of competance, so I thought I'd ask my flist.

( your thoughts on music players )

I occasionally perpetrate poetry. It's not very good. Here is some good poetry from my flist.

kphoebe: More About Them, to commemorate strangers asking about her boobs.

revena: I owe Robyn a nickel for writing this. See if you can pick out the phrase she was dared to incorporate.

(But first, look what delights CBC offers me: Starring Jason Priestley and William Shatner, this two-part mini-series is based on the true story of the 1982 Canadian climbing expedition to Mount Everest, the world's highest mountain. Oh, Canada.)

Today's book discussion topic: bad books that you do like, or books that you feel are wrongly painted as bad, dammit!

No claiming you like them 'ironically' or because they're bad: either defend them, or explain why you like them anyway. No listing titles and then failing to expand.

( me first! )

You may be aware I have a name-thing. My name thing is this: I don't remember them. Who are you again? I'm generally better with authors, (their names are written down) but the other day I bought a book by S. L. Viehl, because the name sounded familiar. "Hey, I remember something about that name. I think I found her..." ANNOYING AS HELL, TURNS OUT. ( whoops. )

Mostly I don't blog a lot about g-w, or when I do it's mostly "rassafrassa where did I live that goddamn password for that blog I installed last month?" but seriously, you guys, here is why G-W is awesome:

In the space of about forty-eight hours, by our powers combined (Shape of a dreidel! Form of an aardvark!) we put together the Con Anti-Harassment Project (What, we did it in two days, you come up with a better name (it was almost the Con Anti-Harassment Campaign, but CAHC sounds kind of... shitty)) a campaign to encourage conventions to articulate and establish clear and comprehensive anti-harassment policies.

That's not the awesome part, though. The awesome part is that our current example of a well articulated anti-harassment policy (it really is) is AnthroCon, and the first paragraph contains a link to "What is a Furry?" I believe we are the only anti-harassment resource on the internet (which is not already in Furry fandom) to do so.

Yes, thank you.

Because that's always fun. (Unless you're some kind of COMMUNIST.) So, today's discussion topic

Which popular or acclaimed book do you feel is overhyped, or just didn't work for you?

RULES:
1. The following books may not be mentioned, because lets face it, that horse has been flayed: Anything by Dan Brown, Laurell K. Hamilton, or Christopher Paolini. No mentioning the Twilight books, anything by Anne RIce, unless you're willing to defend at least six of her works as 'Very good, and quite enjoyable', and nothing by Elizabeth Bear, because she is my imaginary girlfriend. (I mean, she's real, not imaginary, but in my imagination, we are dating.) More to be added as I whimsically decide to disallow your example. But basically, I'm not looking for round thirty-seven of "Why Twilight Sucks".

2. No listing books and then not giving your reasons. SHOW YOUR WORK.

3. Disagreement in the comments is strongly encouraged! But if you can't be civil, I will be forced to make the sadface.
( I'll go first! )

On the subject of intersectionality, I don't have too much to say because I'm mostly still arriving at the 'recognition of own ignorance' stage. But this may be helpful to other people in the same stage.

I'd like to quote something I said in the comments of my own entry for IBARW last year

I do agree with you that a lot of what we take for "male privilege" probably have a lot to do with intersections of other things that are taken for default (and hence, privilege.) Perhaps "religious majority privilege" or "English speaking privilege." But I'm not seeing that a person would have "less" male privilege because of not having some other privilege. Wouldn't that person just have, say, male privilege, but not white privilege, or white privilege, but not able-bodied privilege? Like, I don't know, say male privilege is thirty units of privilege (UP) and able bodied privilege also thirty UP, and white privilege another thirty UP. (All values more or less made up.) We could then, in imaginary objective land, add all these up to determine someone's total privilege.

I quote this not because it's smart, or accurate, or helpful, but because I was OH SO LUDICROUSLY WRONG. Well, I'm not sure I was wrong about privilege not being negated, I still think that's right, but on the idea of a simple mathematics of privilege I was due wrong and accelerating, and not just because of the near impossibility of objectively measuring privilege. ( Exploration of how I was WRONG WRONG WRONG. )

What I wrote in this entry: "Do not compare sexism to racism; it is unnecessary and offensive. (And generally betrays your ignorance.)"

What certain people appear to have heard: "Please, share with me your thoughts on why sexism is a more serious problem than racism."

POOR READING COMPREHENSION, PEOPLE.

Anyway, happy-making things:

This turtle! HIS LITTLE FACE. I've had that tab open for twelve hours now, and I keep going back to it. HIS LITTLE FACE.

This post on Making Light has given me the image of Jayne playing Ado Annie in Oklahoma.  I'm reluctant to read the thread and discover I am not the only special snowflake to whom this beautiful possibility has occurred.

rubynye  wrote "Venusian Macchiato, a Futurama fic which includes the text:

Everyone else is escorting the Professor to a conference where Fry and Leela might have been dissected, so they celebrated their day off with a visit to the new Starbeans(TM) around the corner. Fry got a caramel mochacappalycheesino, and Leela had a Venusian Macchiato with extra whipped cream.

And also sex. Between Fry and Leela.

I think I have said enough. Mochacappalycheesino.

( Would you like to fight racism while fighting sexism? One simple way is to abstain from that which is odious )

(The theme of this IBARW is intersectionality, and I am trying to put together a post on this difficult topic, but this is what came out instead. I hope I can get the other out too.)

Apropos of not much, I got to thinking about Piers Anthony yesterday. I actually read a fair number of his Xanth novels, before I was fifteen. I thought the puns were annoying, (sorry) but it contained centaurs and stuff, so that was cool. I was vaguely aware that there was something mildly sketchy about his issues, but since I was about thirteen, this was more exciting than off-putting.

Then I got to The Blue Adept. In the first chapter, the protagonist meets a sexy lady who he agrees to tutor in exchange for sex. (It is explained that exchanging sex for goods and services is common in their society, so that's okay!) Then he discovers that the sexy lady is actually a robot, so he overpowers her and downloads her source code to examine it-- through a port in her ear. "You raped me!" she sobs, and the protagonist reflects that this is true since he did stick an unwanted device in her orifice.

Now, this is all going from memory, since I haven't read this book since I was fourteen-ish, so I could have some details wrong, but as I recall, the sexy lady robot is programmed to be in love with our protagonist, and continues to help him out, despite the rape, but in the next chapter he finds himself on some pseudo-medieval world where a widowed Lady, in the wears-a-point-hat-with-a-wisp-on-top sense of 'lady', throws herself upon him and he decides he's in love with her, since she comes with a castle, and gets the sexy lady robot to help him out in defeating medieval-lady's enemies so that they can be married, or something.

I might have continued to read this, since it was sexier than the usual SF I got out of the library, but I discovered my baby brother reading the second book in the series, and was horrified, which made explicit to me how I felt about Anthony. I think I managed to confiscate the book from my brother. (Why yes, I totally censored the heck out of him!)

Anyway, that was pretty much the end of Piers Anthony for me, even at fourteen, except I remember my writing teacher mentioning that she didn't read SF, since someone once recommended Piers Anthony to her as an example, and I was deeply embarrassed for the genre, and tried to explain to her that he wasn't perhaps the best example.

Well, I also bear him a grudge for preventing me from discovering Pratchett for a long time, since someone once recommended Pratchett to me as "Like Piers Anthony," but that's not quite his fault.

When I read this headline "Johnny Depp to play Mad Hatter", I naturally assumed it was for the as-yet-unnamed Batman sequel. Turns out it's for some kinda Alice in Wonderland thingdo.

I like my version better.

By 'cheater', I mean those of us (me) who don't want to do it the hard (right) way, but don't want it to look too crappy. By Conlang, I mean 'constructed language', like Quenya, Esperanto, and Klingon.

Okay, so, you want your work of fiction to have a language in it that isn't an Earth language. Unfortunately, all the languages you speak are Earth-languages! (Except if you speak Klingon or Quenya, I'll grant.) How to get around this?

Well, you're not writing your entire novel in your made-up language, because no one except you speaks that language, and the audience would be pretty small. (I mean, go ahead if you like. I'll just be... over here. You do your thing.) Want you want to create is the impression on the reader that there is an entire language, just around the corner, like barking off-stage signals dogs.

There are plenty of really fabulous guides to doing it right; giving your language a grammar, a structure, an alphabet, a history, all the things real languages have. But this is hard work.

( thus, cheating: )

If you're going to ask me what are my qualifications, that's fair. I don't really have any, except that I've read a lot of stuff that does it wrong, and some stuff that did it right, and I can find the bathroom in three languages.

Or, as all Canadians secretly refer to themselves in their hearts, "godless communists."

I was looking at the banknotes of Canada in a friend's locked entry, and thinking how convenient it is to have a Queen: whenever someone on a banknote becomes historically embarrassing, and we have no ready substitute, we just stick Liz on it, let's be frank, she has a great face for coinage.* (Unlike some I won't mention, wtf.)

But can we agree to secede from the Commonwealth before Chuck wears the pointy hat? There is no graven image of that man I want to carry around in my pants.

* I would link to the mint website, but they are winning this month's Accessibility-Shmaccessibility! award with an all-Flash website.

Durn comment-spammers are getting smarter, and seem to be recycling used lj comments as a way of giving themselves a posting history in order to gain credibility. I honestly spent a while trying to figure out if there was any legitimate reason why someone would have responded to that post with their thoughts on Katchoo/Francine.

If you were designing a 6 credit, second year course on "Our Fannish Heritage", that is to say, in imaginary Fandom U where you inculcate fresh young fans, what would the syllabus look like?

You may or may not know that there's been problems with the pilot episode of Leverage leaking onto the internet. A copy of it fell off a truck near me, and obviously I had to watch it to make sure it wasn't a ransom demand for the safe return of a little puppy, gone tragically astray. I know some people are hoping 'The Middleman' gets a fandom, I'm not really feeling it, but Leverage totally could. Pretty, competent, slightly crazy people with a skewed morals, pursuing justice outside the law. Pasting from harriet_spy now, because I'm bad at actors: "Nate is Timothy Hutton, Eliot is Christian Kane, Alec is Aldis Hodge [Voodoo from FNL], Sophie is Gina Bellman from Coupling."

I'm just saying! Things fall off trucks! Keep a lookout.

---

Writers! Writing is wanted!

Jenn from reappropriate is putting together Girl-Wonder newsletter and is looking for content. I know there's some comic content that appears intermittently on my flist that deserves to be shared with a wider audience. Get your geek on. (girlness optional.)

It always warms the cockles of my heart when fandom fundraises for a good cause. The livelongnmarry comm has 774 entries of people auctioning off whatever they can think of to raise funds for equal marriage. If you're looking for made-to-order fanfic, you can get a pretty good deal by browsing the community's tags, but there's also lots of random, interesting, weird, and awesome entries, a selection of which I have thoughtfully compiled for you. I've stuck the price to beat on them too, although that may have changed since this was sort of compiled as I browsed.

( shiny things )

Happy forth of July, those for whom it is happy! My first of July, (which is when us Canadians attempt to have our similar celebration ahead of time, in order to feel like we have won something) was pretty good, and I am seriously pleased to note that Dr. Henry Morgentaler has been given the Order of Canada. There are a great many people whose heads will (metaphorically, alas) explode at this.

I wanted to offer something for livelongnmarry, but I know I couldn't promise fiction, and I don't think there's much of a market for a beta reader (and it's a bit difficult to give people a sample of your beta-reading skills anyway.) Do people think there might be a market for Canadian-picking, though?

Two things I realized I forgot to mention in my review of Moon Called:

( For the record. ).