Sidetracks - Jun 9, 2022

[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. You can also support us on Patreon.

Jodie

1. A partial history of British design in biscuit form.

2. What if everything on Netflix was actually Heartstopper?

3. Speaking of Heartstopper, Yasmin Finney (who plays Elle) joins the cast of Dr Who! There has been a LOT of great Dr Who news over the last few weeks, but I assume you've heard the rest of it.

4. All the possible novel plots!

5. 'Girls don't want boys girls want Natalie Portman as Thor' is a very hard statement to argue with.

6. Unsettling Futures - Brandon Sanderson, fame and the failure of the Long Tail by Matthew Claxton is a really interesting look at the problem of discoverability in SFF.

7. Charles Payseur thinks about "how dead is the author?" Unsurprisingly, it's very complicated.

8. Jake Daniels becomes the first gay, UK male football player to publically come out while actively playing since Justin Fashanu in 1990.

9. Leah Johnson's essay TLDR; I tweeted myself into a career and now I'm stuck online is probably one of the best personal pieces I've read about the difficulties of social media, and shaping it to your own needs.

KJ

10. If you're looking for a relatively low-cost, low-effort DIY air filtration device, I highly recommend Corsi-Rosenthal boxes, which you can build using four furnace filters and a box fan. These were all over the place at WisCon, and they helped me feel much more secure about the air I was breathing.

11. Speaking of WisCon, the GoH for 2023 have been announced, and they are none other than Martha Wells and Rivers Solomon! I literally could not be more excited.

12. John Scalzi posted a ten-year-later retrospective on "Straight White Male: The Lowest Difficulty Setting There Is", his classic essay describing the concept of privilege without using the word privilege.

13. bewires shared some interesting musings on the relationship between fanfiction and criticism and how it's evolved over the years.

14. Activison Blizzard recently released a tool that attempts to quantify diversity of representation in its games. The responses ranged from skepticism to outright scorn, and I can totally understand that. But given that my day job is at a social science research non-profit whose entire purpose is to promote evidence-based decision making, I can also see how a bunch of video game execs decided a tool like this was a good idea. (To be clear, I don't think it's a good idea, especially not as a replacement for more thoughtful approaches to representation.)

15. Seth Green was all set to make an animated series starring his Bored Ape NFT, until he fell for a phishing scam and it got stolen.

16. Here's a long but interesting interview with Matt Mullenweg, CEO of Automattic, the company that owns WordPress and Tumblr, among other things. Skim down about halfway if you're mostly interested in what he has to say about the company's plans for keeping Tumblr going.