Items with assorted themes
These links are sort of grouped thematically, but there are only two or three per grouping, so I decided to lump them all together in one entry instead of posting them as several separate entries. The themes are bolded for ease of scanning.
A couple of items vaguely related to publishing and books and such:
- Various friends and I have occasionally held story readings for about twenty years now, though I haven't been to one in quite a while. I was recently reminded that various Yale, Boston, and Bay Area groups also do this, and in fact that those affiliated groups have a Storyreading web page. My best guess is that our readings derived indirectly from the Yale group, but we've never known for sure.
- Print-on-demand magazines: MagCloud.
- Snarky discussion of too-common tropes in YA fiction, by Talulah Mankiller.
A couple of items related to women:
- Tomboy Tools: "Learn today, teach tomorrow, build forever." They sell tools—hammers, drills, plumbing tools, gardening tools, paintbrushes, goggles, etc—for women. Many of the tools are pink, though some are blue. They also have some kind of sales and/or training program; I can't tell from a cursory examination of the website how that works, but it kind of looks like a cross between Tupperware parties and home-repair training. I honestly don't know enough about them to have a sense of whether what they do is a good thing or not, but I was tickled by the pink tools.
- The decision to cover up Supergirl's panties in comic books. It's about time.
A couple of items related to race:
- "The Intersection of Race and Steampunk: Colonialism's After-Effects & Other Stories, from a Steampunk of Colour's Perspective," by Jha. Good stuff. See also Lavie Tidhar's Steampunk backgrounder article from a few years ago at IROSF, and Ben's characterization of Steampunk and related genres as having to do with "archaic technology which is whimsically given the job of implementing far greater functionality than it could actually support."
- Entertaining brainstorming from 2007 about the nonexistent roleplaying game Caucasian Adventures. "In the same way that Japanese-inspired RPGs are sometimes accused of being exotified stereotypes of outsiders looking in, so too is Caucasian Adventures an exaggerated image of white culture."
A couple of items related to the elections in Iran:
- Good discussion from mid-June of Twitter vs the mainstream media in reporting on the Iran election and subsequent events.
- Interesting piece about the role of women in Iran's protests.
A couple of videos:
- How to make hot "ice" (video).
- Nice Colbert Report bit on the false rumors of Jeff Goldblum's death. Best part is Goldblum's eulogy for himself.