Sidetracks - March 10, 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

➝ Kate McKinnon and Hillary Clinton got dinner together in Manhattan recently. So… there’s that, at least.

➝ FIYAH is a new literary magazine dedicated to black speculative fiction with roots in the Harlem Renaissance magazine FIRE!!.

➝ Television Without Pity, a cornerstone of recap culture, will be returning in 2017. Dreams really do come true.

➝ Baka Bukas is a sweet lesbian romantic comedy, which is a first for the Philippines! I want to see it when it hits international release.

➝ Due to that epic snafu, Moonlight will have to share its narrative with Lalaland forever.

Jodie

➝ This week I learned how Greg Owen, a HIV positive gay man who has spent part of his life homeless, brought about a dramatic drop in HIV diagnoses in the UK. Probably the best story I read all week.

➝ Here's a link to The Liberation Library wishlist where you can buy books for young people in prison (this is one of the projects recently featured on BookRiot by veronikellymars & bkshelvesofdoom.

➝ Roxane Gay's thoughts on Simon and Schuster cancelling Milo's book contract are spot on. I'm immensely glad this book will not exist but S&S's big bosses have made it pretty clear they're happy to throw everyone under the bus for money.

➝ Lego are going to make a women of NASA series of figures that includes Katherine Johnson & Sally Ride (reminder to self - get that cool Sally Ride biography you'd totally forgotten about).

➝ I had no idea a Black Lightning project was in the works at the CW but I am now very excited about it. Cress Williams is confirmed as the lead character. His daughters will be played by Nafessa Williams and China Anne McClain.

➝ Meanwhile, Fox is developing a Blink pilot starring Jamie Chung. Jamie Chung gets her own show!

➝ Mahershala Ali, Tom Hardy & Channing Tatum set to work together in Triple Frontier, an action-adventure film, in 2018. No real details yet but I am all about that cast.

➝ You can read an excerpt from Leigh Bardugo's Women Woman: Warbringer YA novel (out in August). I still haven't read Bardugo's fiction so maybe this could be my starting point.

➝ Finally, Jenny posted about Iron Cast by Destiny Soria - a book I also highly recommend you read.

KJ

➝ This New Yorker piece about being backstage at the Oscars would have been an interesting look at even an ordinary awards show, although of course it also covers the epic Best Picture foul-up in detail. I particularly enjoyed the segment dealing with the Academy's librarian, on hand to answer questions about past nominations and the ceremony's place in history.

➝ (Note: the following links include ad images that may be NSFW, although the content itself should be fine for most.) Via anoutlawlife, Erika Lynae asks whether porn is feminist, and concludes that the question is not particularly useful given the broadness of that category. She also linked to an interesting article from sex blogger Girl on the Net, in which I learned that over half of the top-ten mainstream free porn sites on the Internet are owned by the same company, MindGeek, which caters specifically to a straight male audience. Turns out media consolidation is a problem in every category of media.

➝I was delighted to learn about the Waffle House Index, a tool that FEMA (the Federal Emergency Management Administration) actually uses to determine the scope and severity of bad weather. (I recently found out that Tim Hortons can serve a similar purpose in Canada, although I don't know if the government tracks that officially.)

➝I knew there was a reason that "Remember Me" is my favorite episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation: it makes a powerful statement about the importance of believing women.

Comments

[bookgazing]

I got the first issue of Fiyah but (as usual) haven't gotten round to reading it yet. I'm so bad at digital.