Sidetracks - January 30, 2017

[helloladies]

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.

Clare

➝ Guess what? Goodnight Moon was written by a wlw and based on a poem she wrote about missing her lady love, awww.

➝ Paul Dini returns to writing Harley Quinn comics!

➝ And Dr. Victoria October, an older trans woman and bioweapon specialist, has joined the cast of Detective Comics.

➝ Kim Kardashian will be making a cameo in Ocean’s Eight, which is just the icing on the top of that wonderful cake of a film.

➝ Geeks Out has successfully Kickstarted Serving Pride, a dinner party designed to teach American queer history to members of the community, especially new members. I adore this idea: it’s flexible enough to allow participants to do deep dives into the topics that interest me and I think it really addresses a lack of historical awareness in modern queer life. (I know I could have used this!)

➝ Anne Hathaway and Rebel Wilson will star in a remake of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. YES PLEASE.

➝ Yuri on Ice has reinvigorated my love of figure skating, just in time to watch Nathan Chen land five quads and break a world record in his long program at the US Nationals. My jaw just dropped.

Jodie

➝ The Supreme Court rules that Parliament must vote before Theresa May can trigger Article 50 to begin taking Britain out of the EU. This case is important because the government has been prevented from treating an advisory referendum as if it is a legally binding motivator that means Britain has to leave the EU. At the same time, we all know what the result of the Parliamentary vote will be, and that's pretty depressing.

➝ June Eric-Udorie is raising money, and marshalling resources, to take black girls to UK screenings of Hidden Figures. You can donate but June is also looking for DBS checked chaperones (the e-mail to get in touch is listed on her Twitter profile).

➝ Speaking of Hidden Figures, have you seen these beautiful watercolour paintings from Stella Blu?

➝ There's gonna be a Black-ish spinoff & Zoey is the breakout character! Is anyone who reads this blog watching Black-ish? Get in touch if you are because I'm excited about this one.

➝ Fifty Shades of Feminist Socialism. Political lit spoofs for the win.

➝ In case you haven't seen it, here's a pretty great letter that Obama wrote to a young girl about waterslides.

KJ

➝ John Scalzi's 10 Point Plan for Getting Creative Work Done in the Age of Trump — Scalzi has written before about losing mindspace to politics and the resulting difficulty in getting stuff done in the context of the 2016 presidential election and its fallout. It's nice both to know that I'm not alone in this, and to have some concrete advice in how to move forward.

➝ Here's a fun bit of fandom history that made the rounds recently: the creator of Pinboard talking about his experiences with fandom when users arrived enmasse from del.icio.us bookmarking service after its new owners broke the interface. His slides from a talk about the fandom userbase are also delightful.

➝ Bitch Magazine asked its readers to submit the pop culture moment that was most important to them as a feminist, and then published the top twenty. Some of these resonate with me a lot (The Golden Girls, Wendy Davis's filibuster, the treatment of Monica Lewinsky), others less so, and it leans a little recent for my personal history, but overall it's a great list.

➝ Relatedly, if you would like to break your TBR, here's a list of 40 new feminist classics from LitHub. You're welcome.

Renay

➝ A mosque in Texas burned down and they're raising money to rebuild.

➝ This talk by Ashley Judd was excellent: Ashley Judd on How to Put an End to Online Gender Violence.

➝ Men Dump Their Anger Into Women is a fascinating read. Many parts of it resonated with me and were applicable even without folding in the sexual interactions.

➝ Last year, my partner and I used GoFundMe to defray some costs of his heart surgery. So reading this article about why the Affordable Care Act is so important really hit home. I hope folks are calling their reps every week to ask them to support reforms to the Affordable Care Act rather than a repeal.

➝ What My Abortion Made Me Realize About Reproductive Justice is a great article that digs into the intersectionality of simply living in the world and why it needs to be at the center of our lives as a matter of course.

➝ I wish I could afford this great shirt. I've got it on the wishlist for later. Maybe someone else will see this link and be inspired to get one and wear it so I can live vicariously through you.

Book Acquisitions

Added TBR: Lucky Boy by Shanthi Sekaran, To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O'Connell, The Space Between the Stars by Anne Corlett, Hold Back The Stars by Katie Khan, Tears We Cannot Stop: A Sermon to White America by Michael Eric Dyson, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate-Discoveries from a Secret World by Peter Wohlleben, Viscera by Gabriel Squailia, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward E. Baptist

Susan

➝ As someone who enjoys reading about writing and the occasional advice column, I am pretty much the target audience Story Hospital. Goals and Deadlines In A Time of Strong Emotions is going to be relevant for a while, as will Accommodating your disability and other limitations. I also find this post on revising and getting back to things you've put down for the night to be helpful, as was this post on why you might prioritise revisions over finishing something and ways to go around it. (That has some good advice on how to trick your brain into letting you finish stuff, which is definitely helpful for me.)

➝ I've not read Nimona yet (I know, I know), but this post on how it became an audiodrama is really interesting!

➝ Someone made a mash-up of HAMILTON AND BEYONCÉ (#Ham4Bey) and it is exactly as great as that sounds!

Comments

[readingtheend.com]

I am so glad that I learned enough about figure skating from Yuri on Ice to comprehend how phenomenal that performance was. Holy hell. FIVE QUADS, that is ridiculous.