ladybusiness | Sidetracks - August 26, 2014

Sidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share with each other. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag.

➝ Recently on Lady Business! Ana reviewed How to Suppress Women's Writing, then teamed up with Jodie to talk about "Burning Girls" by Veronica Schanoes. I weeped over Guardians of the Galaxy, some random awards were announced, I posted recs, reviewed Kameron Hurley's essay collection, and then Kameron Hurley herself (The Mirror Empire is out RIGHT NOW!) dropped by with Gender, Family, Nookie: The Speculative Frontier. Basically, we've had a busy two weeks. GO US.

➝ Woman writes a script that goes on to become summer juggernaut film, everyone else is quick to note that it changed, okay! It changed a lot. What woman?

➝ Another great Guardians recap by

likeadeuce.

➝ A History Lesson From the Captain America Fandom which is a fascinating hole to go down, full of amazing links. I do find it a little unfortunate that the article linked to commentary about one of the links instead of the actual link, Steve Rogers' 1930s/1940s neighbourhood by

thingswithwings, which I still love. FANDOM POWER.

➝ via

metanews — From Kevin's Feige's Emporium of Disingenuous Commentary: Why Marvel Isn’t Doing A Female-Led Movie (yet)

➝ A different perspective on Lucy, concerning entertainment value.

➝ An older article about Peggy Carter and her one-shot, which I really liked for the way it talks about dealing with our history through fantasy narratives.

➝ Get off your butts, editors! (Unless you're already off your butts. In that case, it's fine.)

➝ Fantastic Breasts and Where To Find Them which went around all week, and which I watched without a trigger warning for sexual assault. Oops.

➝ Georgia Football Player Joins A Book Club With Some Very Nice Ladies — I'm not going to lie, I was biting my thumb through the end of this because it's so fucking cute. It makes me want my own book club. :(

➝ This kid has a cookie company and a sweet style. Tooth-rottingly adorable.

➝ The Genre Fountain by Robert Jackson Bennett, who has a book coming out soon with an interesting premise (disclaimer: it's apparently not about stairs).

➝ Our very own Ana went to Loncon and wrote about her experience!

➝

kate_nepveu has tons of great write-ups about Loncon

➝ There Should Be No More Back-to-Back US Worldcons. Ever. — Given that I'm American, I am less severe than Jonathan is about back-to-back US Worldcons. But surely there's some mechanism that could encourage location diversity so more than two consecutive US Worldcons in a row is an outlier rather than the norm? If US Worldcons are a "safe" option because there are fans here that know how to run them, are there not ways for new chairs in non-US locations to work with previous chairs in US locations to share experience, knowledge, and resources to make having more non-US Worldcons a thing? I share this opinion having never attended a convention.

➝ So, You Want to Vote on Worldcon Location? Yay! — this is helpful but I still find the site selection process utterly confusing. I really want to support Helsinki! I AM STILL NOT SURE HOW. This is the next thing that needs to be pulled out of the dark ages and updated to be more accessible.

➝ via Cora, #HugoAwards 2014: A bit more detail and Breaking Down the Hugos: Careful Like, if you like stats and nerdery about the Hugos.

➝ “I’ve never really thought about it”: librarians’ attitudes to the provision of LGBT-related fiction to children and young people in English public libraries is excellent and well worth reading. Once again we come back to how the status quo isn't neutral.

➝ I've been following the news from Ferguson and listening and trying to learn. A few links I found useful: Ferguson: The signal it sends about America, Say What?: On Speechlessness, Racism and Respectability in #Ferguson, and #Ferguson - How We Got Here (a reading list by Left Bank Books).

➝ Dolls or Action Figures? Hints or Hacks? Inspiration or FanFic? is a great piece by Liz Burns about gendered language.

➝ I loved this essay by Nina LaCour (whose Everything Leads To You made me really happy):

Because when I think about a love story, I think of how seeing Kristyn walk into a classroom felt like catching a glimpse of a beautiful future. Of driving back and forth across the Golden Gate Bridge, from my place to her place, the music on loud, the windows rolled down. Of planning a road trip before we’d even kissed. Of kissing for the first time while holding a map of America, daring to imagine that our lives together could be just as expansive.

Because, since the beginning, it was meant to be a simple love story. A yes-there-are-gay-people-everywhere story. A yes-we-hold-hands-in-public story.
Because when I was nineteen and falling in love, “sin” was a word that didn’t occur to me.

➝ Just in case anyone other than me somehow managed to miss this, Frankenstein, MD (a genderbent webseries adaptation of Frankenstein by Pemberley Digital) has started :D

➝ Jessica Tripler lists the Top 10 Literary References in Friday Night Lights.

➝ Some statistics about gender balance at UK Music festivals this summer.

➝ And on a somewhat related note, I'll end with a song:

"" (Watch on YouTube)

I was thinking that perhaps from now on I could end my section of Sidetracks with a video by a female musician or woman-fronted band. Y/N?

Sidetracks - August 26, 2014

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