Sidetracks - September 2, 2012
Sep. 2nd, 2012 03:38 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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ladybusinessSidetracks 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.
➝ Another awesome shirt I would love to add to my collection.
➝ I loved ALL the Amazon reviews for BIC For Her Amber Medium Ballpoint Pen. ALL OF THEM.
➝ I have a hurricane phobia that several people who shall remain nameless often mock me for. But ugh, THEY'RE SO BIG AND THEY'RE COMING RIGHT FOR YOU. I can't handle it. It doesn't help that there are butthead anchors out in the middle of it all going "LOOK AT US STANDING IN THIS WILD WIND! LOOK WE CAN BARELY STAND! ISN'T THIS AWFUL?" Ugh. But regardless of my phobia, I find hurricanes fascinating to learn about. This is the same thing as the deal when you're terrified of spiders (like me) and someone reblogs or retweets or links to an article/picture essay about spiders and like a fool YOU CLICK ON IT AUUUUGH WHY.
Or maybe I just dislike myself...
NASA shared an image of Isaac right after landfall. The scope of the storm compared to our expansive cities that hold so many of us inside them is staggering. The full size image is definitely worth it. Nature is amazing.
➝ I nodded through The Power of Spice. Every reason in this post resonated with me, especially this:
The point here is not whether they were genuinely friends, but that their constant message to their (predominantly young and female) audience was how important friendship is, especially between women. Too often women are portrayed as being in competition with one another, usually over men.
The Spice Girls were a quick fad in my town that dropped off the radar fast, although I kept up with them and listened to their music up until I left for college. This article is a really great look at what the Spice Girls were doing right in the context of a problematic culture of the 90s. Obviously we can look back and critique them for what they did wrong, but at the time they were great role models, especially for someone like me, trapped in a rural, Southern, conservative town.
➝ I read The Book Will Never Die a few weeks ago. Then last week when I was talking to the YA librarian at the public library, she said something that pinged my memory and I basically repeated a line from this post almost word for word. I guess that means it stuck with me. *g*
What I mean by this is that in order to listen to music or watch a film, at home or in the theater, you require an intermediary device—not only your vinyl, your Betamax, your cassette, your VHS tape, your CD, or your DVD, but the record player, your VCR, your Walkman, or your DVD player. In stark contrast, a printed book is both content and delivery system; in fact, the technical term for said delivery system is the codex (as opposed to a scroll), and we’ve had it for, oh, eighteen centuries with little variation. If I snap a DVD in half, I don’t damage the DVD player. If I brutally maim a book, I’ve also damaged the codex. A movie on the shelf cannot play itself, but a book is what is at any moment, without any need for any other device. There’s a reason it’s survived relatively unchanged throughout the years.
Through this conversation with the librarian, I discovered that ebook requests are WAY up. It's the preferred medium for our library now. Surprising.
➝ I am not a big fan of math, but recently I discovered Vi Hart. The first video I watched was Doodling in Math Class: Connecting Dots:
Meanwhile, anyone who actually learns how to think mathematically can then learn how to graph a parabola or anything else they need in like five minutes. But teaching how to think is an individualized process that gives power and responsibility to individuals while teaching what to think can be done with one-size-fits-all bullet points and checkboxes. And our culture of excuses demands that we do the latter, keeping ourselves placated in the comforting structure of tautology and clear expectations.
I spent so much time watching all the videos. Fascinating!
➝ Well, with Worldcon underway, I wonder what's going to happen to the petition to create a YA category for the Hugo award. I feel conflicted about it because I have only really followed the Hugo award for a short time so while my kneejerk reaction is YES WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? the other half of me wonders if it should simply be left in the Best Novel category. But if I am understanding Hugo award rules right, they can decide to do a temporary category, right, to test the waters? I admit I often misunderstand Hugo rules and eligibility and picky details about categories. Looking at the Hugos now, what I see (whether this is right or not) is an award system that is slow to adapt to changing realities in publishing and SF/F media culture. Best Fancast is new this year (and apparently temporary?). That seems like a huge oversight/mistake, so I hope someone is working some magic somewhere to make it permanent. Embrace change, SF/F fandom! I will be...over here holding my breath! Ana, what do you think?
I also feel like adding that category would make the award itself more accessible to the YA community and women who read a lot of YA. That's a group of people the SF/F fandom wants to court, right? People who like YA SF/F, who will be tempted in with gateway drugs and then end up shooting up the authors they missed or hadn't yet been made aware of? The librarian inside me rejoices at the thought of Hugo displays. EXCUSES FOR GIANT CARDBOARD ROCKETS and a history lesson! Ugh, it would be beautiful. But alas, no category exists and I am not a librarian.
Maybe one day!
➝ Men Reading Women in Comics is a tumblr whose goal is to debunk "the myth that men don't want strong, diverse, and interesting representations of women in comics":
We do this knowing that there is still important work to be done. To increase the visibility of women reading comics. To increase the representation of women in the comics industry. To improve the representation of women in comics – making them more diverse and challenging objectification. To ensure that the comics industry is held accountable not just to its ‘target male demographic’, but to all the readers who don’t fit within those narrow parameters.
Thumbs up.
➝ This is old-ish news, but I only discovered The Everyday Sexism Project the other day via Twitter. Their aim is to "catalogue instances of sexism experienced by women on a day to day basis". As expected, there are lots of horrifying stories in there, but having them all gathered in one place makes for a really useful resource.
➝ The I am Fuel, You Are Friends house concert series makes me desperately wish I blogged about music instead of books (okay, not really, but almost). The most recent one by Blind Pilot is absolutely lovely. I saw them opening for The Decemberists last year and they were really great.
➝ The "fake nerd girl" meme is turned on its head. About time!
➝ Love this article on the language of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that my friend Claire sent my way :D
But what really creates a sense of Buffyness, a Buffylike presence, a certainty of Buffdom, is not the compound coinages and the special words and usages themselves; it’s the contexts in which they’re used. If Buffy the Vampire Slayer can be said to have Romeo and Julietted late-nineties TV, it’s because Buffy, like Shakespeare’s seminal teen angst spectagedy, doesn’t see why what is trivial, simple, adolescent, comic, and genre-based cannot illuminate and interrogate what is important, sophisticated, universal, tragic, or literary.
➝ Debi, this might be of interest to you: the September/October issue of The Humanist is entirely dedicated to women in secularism.
➝ And Amy, you'll be happy to hear I'm now completely convinced I have to watch Veronica Mars. I've been warned before that I'll have to brace myself for the final seasons, but it sounds totally worth it.
➝ They found Scott's ship the Terra Nova. Super exciting. Remind me to bore you all by talking about the Scott exhibition again some time soon :P
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Date: 2012-09-02 12:54 pm (UTC)Debi
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Date: 2012-09-02 04:20 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2012-09-03 06:43 pm (UTC)Veronica ♥♥♥
MY REACTION TO THIS NEWS
Date: 2012-09-04 04:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-03 05:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-09-04 04:44 am (UTC)