Sidetracks - September 5, 2019

[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. For more links and commentary you can follow us on Twitter, Tumblr. You can also support us on Patreon.

KJ

1. Internet linguist Gretchen McCullough's new book, Because Internet, was a delight, and so is this article on the process of writing it.

2. From the archives, here's an article from Atlas Obscura mapping out the structure of various Choose Your Own Adventure books.

3. fairestcat writes about the significance of the AO3 Best Related Work Hugo and sets it in the context of wider SFF fandom. I was at the Wiscon panel she mentions this year, which was a great discussion about how the stature of fanfiction has changed over just the last decade.

4. On the lighter side of fanfic, a neural net attempts to write fic, with varying levels of success.

Renay

5. Here's a list of books out in the second half of the year that backed a metaphorical dump truck up to my TBR and poured all its contents in.

6. This examination of the food at the Iowa State Fair made me both hungry for fair food but also aware that my arteries are not getting any younger.

7. I know I grew up under the thumb of the Lost Cause narrative, and only truly escaped when blasted through all the history courses at my rural public high school (there were no advanced history courses available) and started doing a lot of my own reading and further study once I hit college. If you don't have time to go through all the state secession documents, here's a great summary, since TED Talks wouldn't let this dude do it either (it would take A While — me, a person who has done it) so he did a bite sized version: A Southern Historian's Lost Cause.

8. The 1619 Project made copies of the New York Times Magazine even in my rural city vanish. I'm still on a wait list somewhere (I do have a digital copy, but I would love the physical magazie), but I was very excited to see that there's education resources for it already!

9. Very excited for this new comic by Gabby Rivera and Royal A. Dunlap, which is about a world where disease wipes out rich people!!!

Comments

[renay]

That post by Cat made me a lot emotional!!!!

I have some ~theories~ about the five years between me going, "hmmm, AO3 is eligible for this" and AO3 winning the award and how myself and a lot of other fans basically stopped being "nice" about our interests and our investments in multiple sides of fandom and embraced them wholesale. It's been pretty nice to watch.