You may be aware I have a name-thing. My name thing is this: I don't remember them. Who are you again? I'm generally better with authors, (their names are written down) but the other day I bought a book by S. L. Viehl, because the name sounded familiar. "Hey, I remember something about that name. I think I found her..." ANNOYING AS HELL, TURNS OUT. ( whoops. )

Mostly I don't blog a lot about g-w, or when I do it's mostly "rassafrassa where did I leave that goddamn password for that blog I installed last month?" but seriously, you guys, here is why G-W is awesome:

In the space of about forty-eight hours, by our powers combined (Shape of a dreidel! Form of an aardvark!) we put together the Con Anti-Harassment Project (What, we did it in two days, you come up with a better name (it was almost the Con Anti-Harassment Campaign, but CAHC sounds kind of... shitty)) a campaign to encourage conventions to articulate and establish clear and comprehensive anti-harassment policies.

That's not the awesome part, though. The awesome part is that our current example of a well articulated anti-harassment policy (it really is) is AnthroCon, and the first paragraph contains a link to "What is a Furry?" I believe we are the only anti-harassment resource on the internet (which is not already in Furry fandom) to do so.

Yes, thank you.

I was browsing in the book shop and came across an Anne Bishop book titled "The Invisible Ring." Usually when I see a Bishop book, I just snerk to myself and move on, but I couldn't help myself. It is a book named after a cock-ring. I don't see how I was supposed to resist.

(Yes, it is gloriously trashy. I don't know why you had to ask.)

Because that's always fun. (Unless you're some kind of COMMUNIST.) So, today's discussion topic

Which popular or acclaimed book do you feel is overhyped, or just didn't work for you?

RULES:
1. The following books may not be mentioned, because lets face it, that horse has been flayed: Anything by Dan Brown, Laurell K. Hamilton, or Christopher Paolini. No mentioning the Twilight books, anything by Anne RIce, unless you're willing to defend at least six of her works as 'Very good, and quite enjoyable', and nothing by Elizabeth Bear, because she is my imaginary girlfriend. (I mean, she's real, not imaginary, but in my imagination, we are dating.) More to be added as I whimsically decide to disallow your example. But basically, I'm not looking for round thirty-seven of "Why Twilight Sucks".

2. No listing books and then not giving your reasons. SHOW YOUR WORK.

3. Disagreement in the comments is strongly encouraged! But if you can't be civil, I will be forced to make the sadface.
( I'll go first! )

( Rogue Clone )

This entry was automatically crossposted from goodreads

( The Pearls )

This entry was automatically crossposted from goodreads

( Warprize (Chronicles of the Warlands, Book #1) )

This entry was automatically crossposted from goodreads

On the subject of intersectionality, I don't have too much to say because I'm mostly still arriving at the 'recognition of own ignorance' stage. But this may be helpful to other people in the same stage.

I'd like to quote something I said in the comments of my own entry for IBARW last year

I do agree with you that a lot of what we take for "male privilege" probably have a lot to do with intersections of other things that are taken for default (and hence, privilege.) Perhaps "religious majority privilege" or "English speaking privilege." But I'm not seeing that a person would have "less" male privilege because of not having some other privilege. Wouldn't that person just have, say, male privilege, but not white privilege, or white privilege, but not able-bodied privilege? Like, I don't know, say male privilege is thirty units of privilege (UP) and able bodied privilege also thirty UP, and white privilege another thirty UP. (All values more or less made up.) We could then, in imaginary objective land, add all these up to determine someone's total privilege.

I quote this not because it's smart, or accurate, or helpful, but because I was OH SO LUDICROUSLY WRONG. Well, I'm not sure I was wrong about privilege not being negated, I still think that's right, but on the idea of a simple mathematics of privilege I was due wrong and accelerating, and not just because of the near impossibility of objectively measuring privilege. ( Exploration of how I was WRONG WRONG WRONG. )

What I wrote in this entry: "Do not compare sexism to racism; it is unnecessary and offensive. (And generally betrays your ignorance.)"

What certain people appear to have heard: "Please, share with me your thoughts on why sexism is a more serious problem than racism."

POOR READING COMPREHENSION, PEOPLE.

Anyway, happy-making things:

This turtle! HIS LITTLE FACE. I've had that tab open for twelve hours now, and I keep going back to it. HIS LITTLE FACE.

This post on Making Light has given me the image of Jayne playing Ado Annie in Oklahoma.  I'm reluctant to read the thread and discover I am not the only special snowflake to whom this beautiful possibility has occurred.

( Ragamuffin )

This entry was automatically crossposted from goodreads

rubynye wrote "Venusian Macchiato, a Futurama fic which includes the text:

Everyone else is escorting the Professor to a conference where Fry and Leela might have been dissected, so they celebrated their day off with a visit to the new Starbeans(TM) around the corner. Fry got a caramel mochacappalycheesino, and Leela had a Venusian Macchiato with extra whipped cream.

And also sex. Between Fry and Leela.

I think I have said enough. Mochacappalycheesino.

( Would you like to fight racism while fighting sexism? One simple way is to abstain from that which is odious )

(The theme of this IBARW is intersectionality, and I am trying to put together a post on this difficult topic, but this is what came out instead. I hope I can get the other out too.)

ETA: Dear anyone I ban, I am a white, cisgendered, middle class female. Please feel free to lower your opinion of those groups according to my behaviour.

Apropos of not much, I got to thinking about Piers Anthony yesterday. I actually read a fair number of his Xanth novels, before I was fifteen. I thought the puns were annoying, (sorry) but it contained centaurs and stuff, so that was cool. I was vaguely aware that there was something mildly sketchy about his issues, but since I was about thirteen, this was more exciting than off-putting.

Then I got to The Blue Adept. In the first chapter, the protagonist meets a sexy lady who he agrees to tutor in exchange for sex. (It is explained that exchanging sex for goods and services is common in their society, so that's okay!) Then he discovers that the sexy lady is actually a robot, so he overpowers her and downloads her source code to examine it-- through a port in her ear. "You raped me!" she sobs, and the protagonist reflects that this is true since he did stick an unwanted device in her orifice.

Now, this is all going from memory, since I haven't read this book since I was fourteen-ish, so I could have some details wrong, but as I recall, the sexy lady robot is programmed to be in love with our protagonist, and continues to help him out, despite the rape, but in the next chapter he finds himself on some pseudo-medieval world where a widowed Lady, in the wears-a-point-hat-with-a-wisp-on-top sense of 'lady', throws herself upon him and he decides he's in love with her, since she comes with a castle, and gets the sexy lady robot to help him out in defeating medieval-lady's enemies so that they can be married, or something.

I might have continued to read this, since it was sexier than the usual SF I got out of the library, but I discovered my baby brother reading the second book in the series, and was horrified, which made explicit to me how I felt about Anthony. I think I managed to confiscate the book from my brother. (Why yes, I totally censored the heck out of him!)

Anyway, that was pretty much the end of Piers Anthony for me, even at fourteen, except I remember my writing teacher mentioning that she didn't read SF, since someone once recommended Piers Anthony to her as an example, and I was deeply embarrassed for the genre, and tried to explain to her that he wasn't perhaps the best example.

Well, I also bear him a grudge for preventing me from discovering Pratchett for a long time, since someone once recommended Pratchett to me as "Like Piers Anthony," but that's not quite his fault.

When I read this headline "Johnny Depp to play Mad Hatter", I naturally assumed it was for the as-yet-unnamed Batman sequel. Turns out it's for some kinda Alice in Wonderland thingdo.

I like my version better.

( The Iron Hunt )

This entry was automatically crossposted from goodreads

( Night Child )

This entry was automatically crossposted from goodreads

( Tea With the Black Dragon )

This entry was automatically crossposted from goodreads

By 'cheater', I mean those of us (me) who don't want to do it the hard (right) way, but don't want it to look too crappy. By Conlang, I mean 'constructed language', like Quenya, Esperanto, and Klingon.

Okay, so, you want your work of fiction to have a language in it that isn't an Earth language. Unfortunately, all the languages you speak are Earth-languages! (Except if you speak Klingon or Quenya, I'll grant.) How to get around this?

Well, you're not writing your entire novel in your made-up language, because no one except you speaks that language, and the audience would be pretty small. (I mean, go ahead if you like. I'll just be... over here. You do your thing.) Want you want to create is the impression on the reader that there is an entire language, just around the corner, that you could produce at any moment if called upon to do so.

There are plenty of really fabulous guides to doing it right; giving your language a grammar, a structure, an alphabet, a history, all the things real languages have. But this is hard work.

( thus, cheating: )

If you're going to ask me what are my qualifications, that's fair. I don't really have any, except that I've read a lot of stuff that does it wrong, and some stuff that did it right, and I can find the bathroom in three languages.

( City of Pearl (Wess'Har, Book 1) )

This entry was automatically crossposted from goodreads

( Thin Air (Weather Warden, Book 6) )

This entry was automatically crossposted from goodreads