Sidetracks - April 1, 2021

[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. Yaa Gyasi wrote White People, black people are not your medicine about anti-racist reading lists and treating black writer's work like a kind of medicine.

2. How Sara Gruen Lost Her Life tells the story of the impact getting involved in a crime case has had on the author of Water For Elephants.

3. Jane Lee made a really interesting thread about her experience of working on social media in publishing and that has a link to Why I'm Leaving Publishing.

4. More awards. Here's the British Book Awards shortlist for Debut Book of the Year. Such a Fun Age!

5. I loved watching this thread about a woman deciding she wasn't going to do all the cleaning for her family play out. Class act.

6. This teacher took his class on a virtual trip to the zoo.

7. Here is a bunny eating grapes.

KJ

8. Over on Primetimer, Joe Reid explains why the Disney+ TV shows would most likely have never existed without Agent Carter paving the way for a series that linked closely to the movies but still stood well on its own.

9. Author Marie Brennan linked to this essay by Bret Deveraux, "The Cult of the Badass", a historical look at war and warriors and how, despite what some people might think, there is no one universal warrior archetype. Instead, he proposes that venerating badassery comes awfully close to venerating fascism, or at the very least is a gateway to authoritarian tendencies. It's sobering to think how much of the media I love, especially in speculative fiction, can start tending this way. Like cop shows. I don't know that we need to reject badassery entirely, but it's certainly something we should pay more attention to.

10. The crew behind The Magpies, an all-women, all-queer, actual play podcast with tons of heists, shenanigans, found family, and feelings, is launching a Kickstarter to fund their upcoming new campaign and create a production company for future projects. I adore this group and the story they are telling, and I'm super excited to see whatever they come up with next.

Renay

11. If you're a Hugo voter and use the crowdsourced spreadsheet to share cool stuff, the sheet for 2022 (stuff made/released in 2021) is open for business! Feel free to bookmark and add things you like through the year.

12. As a queer adult who was a queer teen in a very religious community, I loved Lil Nas X's new music video; the song is great, too.

13. In the same vein, this article about how Lil Nas X and his fans are using Twitter fandom tactics to counter the predictable backlash from a performative evangelicals is great.

14. This interview with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez came across my Twitter timeline and I was floored by the quote the person used to promote it.

There’s this one moment I’ll never forget. We were going through the appropriations process, I believe in 2019 or so. And basically, this is how we fund the entire government, we go along and we fund each agency after the other. And there are these massive multi-thousand-page packages. And I remember finding … sometimes it’s as simple as hitting Control-F and just trying to find every policy-related keyword, to see what’s getting appropriated, and see what you can dig through. That’s literally how some folks go about this, when you’re given 1,000 pages of legislation 48 hours before it drops. But we found this really bizarre appropriation for fossil fuel facilities, and it was like a multi billion dollar giveaway, I believe, at the time. And we were like, “Where did this come from? Did someone slip this in?” And we were gonna propose an amendment to take it out. So we raised the question about this. And because no one wanted to ‘fess up and actually own that they were the one who put that in, it was withdrawn without actually making it a floor fight. Yeah. I don’t think we ever got to the bottom of who was behind that. Clearly, you know, this is lobbyist driven. This was a lobbyist’s language that someone asked to put in. But because the actual line item was so shameful, no one wanted to actually ‘fess up to the fact that they put this in.

15. I remain convinced that The View keeps Meghan McCain on the show because they believe if they drop her and replace her with someone with, you know, commentary show skills, their relevance will fade. I wonder how many people would watch if they would boot her and rework her slot into a guest host slot, like a commentator-in-residence, who could do short three or six month stints on the show. Imagine the opportunities available to marginalized voices who did a program like that! Anyway, it's nice to dream about but it will never happen. What will happen is that McCain will continue to be ignorant and we all get to enjoy competent critics like Tiffany Cross reading her for filth.

16. Dr. Rachel Levine was confirmed as the assistant secretary to Department of Health and Human Services. This is a really bright spot of good news given the trash fire the Arkansas legislative session has been.

17. I loved this collection of SFF books containing organized labor. I want more SFF books to include unions! I love unions.

18. This essay about being careful with photos of yourself near your house was eye-opening. The farther we go into a hybrid of meatspace/digital life, the easier it's going to be for bad actors to find people. It's easy enough now. Takeaway: no photos outside where you live and crop/censor things that could give people a clue in any photos you post.

19. In gelatinous sphere news, we have eggs!

20. The boat memes have been extremely good. If you see a good one, for example, like this, please immediately share it with me. I love them. I love them all.

21. Here's a video of a turtle with a cooling scratching machine.

Susan

22. As someone who's really been failing at staying in contact during this apocalypse, this Captain Awkward post about how to reach out to your humans is really kind and understanding.

Comments

[bookgazing]

The Captain Awkward column was really useful. Thanks for sharing :D