jhameia | Entries tagged with links

A bit late, but here goes two weeks of things I read:

Deadline Feb 28: Association of Research Libraries (ARL)/Society of American Archivists (SAA) Mosaic Program II is looking specifically for applicants from racially-underrepresented groups

Late but useful, a professor I TA'd for posted her framework for first-day-of-class introductions. Rather than asking "where are you from" she asks, "where do you know from?" As in, how do you trace your genealogy of knowledge, how do you learn things. Needless to say, I'm still thunderstruck by this, and wish I'd gotten a chance to use it. Maybe in a future workshop I will!

A list of People of Color in Publishing open to conference speaking invitations.

Still mulling this Electric Literature article on the decline in author incomes because on one hand, okay sure it's not just Amazon's fault, but it also sort of blames consumer entitlement?

The Choose Your Own Adventure book publisher sued Netflix over Black Mirror: Bandersnatch and well, CYOA has always been trademarked. I didn't watch the episode so I don't know if the exact phrase was used, but my friend Magpie was also similarly told, and thus their book Beneath the Clock Tower is not a "Choose Your Own Adventure" but "An Adventure of Your Choosing."

Microsoft sued guy whose business is recycling computers for infringing on their copyright

Rahel Aima on how global finance and art are intertwined leading to art being stored in tax-free storage in freeports, and then to moving exhibitions using these storage lockers as exhibit spaces

On not feeling the obligation to read racist books (via

brithistorian

LA Review of Books had this interesting research by Laura McGrath on lists of "comparable titles" in publishing and how they skew white

91% of Americans living in Mexico are undocumented. As in, "illegal immigrants."

Forward Magazine asking why the pro-Israel right-wingers are so threatened by black Jews

A blind girl and her family work out a way for blind Jews to participate in an ancient bar mitzvah tradition

A memoir essay on growing up with a genetic mutation that causes advanced puberty

The origin of the term "Mandarin" to refer to Chinese officials and the language AND IT IS MALAY WHOA

Medieval medical scholar Katherine Park debunks the myth that dissections were taboo in medieval Europe

Someone read 20,000 Yelp reviews, and found 7% of them, some 1,500, talk about authenticity, which is really a trap for non-white restaurant owners and a sign of white supremacy in action

Turns out the sugar pills on birth control strips aren't necessary and were there just because of the Pope's naysaying

K. Tempest Bradford on how not everyone notices or can skip the missing stair. It's a nice change from the old "how did you not KNOW? EVERYONE knows about this problematic dude" discourse.

20 years after publishing Speak, a novel about the aftermath of sexual assault, the author reflects on things that young boys still don't understand

Why some books have "A Novel" on the cover (which sort of boil down to "convention and clarity"

Some articles on Marie Kondo because, well, just because:

BookRiot: No, Marie Kondo does not want you to throw away all your books

Hypable: Marie Kondo isn't coming for your books; you're just being xenophobic

The Lily: The hidden feminist message of Marie Kondo's tidying movement (which kinda seems to be, girl, sometimes you just gotta throw the whole man away)

Refinery29: Marie Kondo Has A Reasonable Response To Your Reasonable Criticisms

Finally, some cool Twitter threads I read:

@cartoonkate shared some panels from her biographical graphic novel (biographic novel? graphic biography? comix bio?) about Doctor Rosa Luxemburg

@sbarolo on the 9 different types of Reply Guys who repeat the same unhelpful comments with a Bingo chart!

@LifeInFiction on the relationship between book marketing and book blogging, after some yelling was done about book bloggers selling ARCs and talk of NEVER GIVING AWAY ARCS EVERY AGAIN!!!!

@a9ri pointing out how even a major news outlet like the BBC can do stupid disingenuous things like use a tweet by a person with only 9 followers as some weighty "other side of the argument"

Whoof. I should really try not to have such a backlog.

After what seems like forever, I finished my first non-fiction book of the year! The Souls of China: The Return of Religion After Mao by Ian Johnson was a lovely series of essays, using the Chinese lunar and agricultural calendar to break up the sections. It covered a wide range of religions and similar practices: Daoism, Buddhism, qigong, Christianity. It's a really lovely portrait of the struggle that a society has in trying to regain it ethical and social bearings after the Cultural Revolution.

It reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend once. Her mother said she didn't think mainlander Chinese were "real" Chinese, because the Cultural Revolution had stamped out so many practices and beliefs, and "real Chinese would never have let that go." And it's interesting to read this book, some 9 years after that conversation, which I think shows that no, these practices and beliefs weren't let go. They're truncated, like a three-day funeral process becoming one when handled by urbanized children, and young people aren't as good at the craft as their elders were, but they are living things that change regardless.

I also really loved the language in the book--Johnson knows how to write a lovely sentence and there were several really nice paragraphs that I wanted to take quote.

Other things I've read recently:

NYT on the Kiini Bikini lawsuit, about how the fashion designer who has a rep for taking anyone copying her design to court herself filched the design from a woman while holidaying.

A visit to a GLITTER FACTORY, there are so many great moments in this.

A sensitive answer about how to gently talk to young people about their attitudes. I really liked the framing of puberty and the attitudes associated with it as a symptom of overwhelming feelings, and how the time period is about learning how to deal with it, and the challenge is to deal with it without being antagonizing towards the people one loves.

An important observation on the racial dot map.

Obituary of Zura Karuhimbi, who saved dozens of people during the Rwandan genocide using her reputation as a witch.

A librarian on media literacy, political memes, and the value of librarians.

A new term / meme in China that roughly translates to "poor ugly" and how people using it to express their, uh, millennial mood, I guess.

A look at the bonkers process of Facebook moderation.

Piece on how Vietnamese food in America is essentially trying to remain the same as it was in the 1970s. A symptom of diaspora nostalgia than it is about living culture.

Tiara had a really good take on the hot takes on Marie Kondo's new show.

The Atlantic on "Instagram Husbands".

Around 2014 is when I first started posting on Facebook, and that's also where I first started sharing links to Facebook instead of collating them and posting them to Dreamwidth. I opened my linkage.txt file for the first time in forever, and there were still articles in there from 2014 that I know I meant to share here, but never got around.

One of the things I liked about social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook was the immediacy of broadcasting articles. Then I didn't have to worry about re-visiting them again.

I really want to take things slower now, and be more mindful about processing and re-processing things I've read. It helps because then I won't feel so overwhelmed by the constant barrage of information, and I think it's a good idea to really sit on things I read and share.

So, looks like in 2014 I read an incest survivor's perspective on Moira Greyland's abuse by Walter Breen and Marion Zimmer Bradley, some grousing on how assumptions that "women married young" are wrong and Juliet in Shakespeare is an outlier adn should not have been counted, one of the first articles I remember talking about how fat-shaming directly contributes to weight gain/maintenance, a UCR Today newspiece about students who created a titanium dioxide mixture coating for rooftiled that can break down nitrogen oxide, about that time Indonesian singers made a tribute music video to their fascistic presidential candidate with Nazi imagery, and the death of an individual's idealism while doing non-profit work.

So this afternoon I went to the Health Center and had to wait a whole hour just for the very nice lady gynae to tell me that I had to undergo ANOTHER colposcopy because my Pap came out abnormal AGAIN and when I got home I was just so BURNED by the fucking sun, I basically sat down for like ten minutes being all like THE WEATHER IS FIRED

I am glad to have found out today that I'm not the only one who feels completely uninspired by SoCal weather and landscape tho

I made a bit more progress reading the academic antho though!

So last night the Internet went bananas after Wendy Davis' filibuster.

An article talking about how the SCOTUS decision yesterday will affect Wendy Davis' campaign

Mizuno's Wave Rider Running Shoes have been getting some amusing reviews as a result of the filibuster

Turns out despite setting out new Voter ID laws, Texas is still subject to preclearance under section 3 of the VRA

Obama visits the Door Of No Return in Senegal

A T-shirt from Magical Misandry, which reads "No Sympathy For Sexual Abusers" and I would totally get one if the shirt wasn't produced by American Apparel

SH reprints Judith Berman's 2001 essay "Science Fiction Without the Future" which is all about how old white fans bitch and moan about how science fiction was better in the good old days.

Colonialism for Dummies: A Story About Chickens To Help Explain Canadian History

Governor Rick Perry calls for special session to re-consider SB5 BECAUSE HE IS A MEGAFUCKFACE

And so it begins--states rushing to get in all sorts of voter ID laws in face of the VRA being under consideration once more

Melissa Harris-Perry's advice on how to deal with the VRA SCOTUS decision

Trans Ally Campaign Launches in Malaysia

Mostly for my reference, a library listing for Na Tien Piet's Shaer Almarhoem Beginda Sultan Abu Bakar di Negri Johor

So today I managed to keep patchy kitty indoors all day and went out to deal with some health insurance stuff. I also rearranged my bookshelves! I have fewer books than I thought. With everything more neat, I can put up the fuu with a good conscience. Gotta vacuum first tho.

My Pap came back with abnormal results AGAIN but I'm hoping this won't mean another colposcopy. Sigh.

= Patchy kitty is very respectful of my sleeping time, it seems. She doesn't come into my bedroom whenever I'm sleeping in it, despite a wide-open door. This doesn't mean she doesn't take the chance of sleeping in my bed, but she def knows she's not supposed to be there because when I see her in it she jumps off. She doesn't like being on laps and she tolerates being held for a couple of minutes, so sleeping with patchy kitty is obviously not going to be A Thing, and I am OK with that. Mostly, she lies down maybe a feet or two away from my chair while I'm at the computer.
- The bad thing is I can't leave the door open because other cats make her nervous still, and I don't think she realizes that other cats aren't allowed in this apartment against her wishes, so she runs out instead. So I'll have to wait awhile before I I can have my door open again. In the meantime, I open the windows, and the orange tabby comes yowling at it for food sometimes.
- Patchy kitty also appears to be much more inordinately fond of wet cat food than dry cat food. Which to me is just another reason to make sure she gets re-homed properly. (Or at least out of here.)
- Her wounds are healing quite nicely even without my intervention! They're scabbing over well, so I apply neospirin when I can get her to sit still, but in general I don't think she needs my help at all. I think she just needs a break from getting chased by the other feral cats, since she's not feral enough to defend herself.

Anyways, enough about patchy kitty.

So I don't know why Comment Is Free is a thing I subscribed to on my new Old Reader account, especially when articles like this one exist and this is a lot of commentary on a man's private life with no real relevance to the world except that he runs a very big media corp?

A Defense of Kanye's Vanity: The Politics of Black Self Love -- I thought this was really interesting.

Neuroscientists have possibly identified how fibromyalgia works! Articles from Yahoo, NDJ World, Medical New Today and News Medical.

Got an email from Dr. L today reminding reviewers for SF Studies that reviews are due Aug 1. AUGH! I thought it was due end of August! So I've read the first three essays in the antho I'm s'posed to review, plus read the introduction and all. It's Steaming Into a Victorian Future and it's not bad so far.

I woke up late, though, so I didn't get out to the insurance office to ask questions like I wanted. Oh well. In the email I got my copy of Dark Matter and instructions for my sleep test! I like mail very much.

The patchy kitty that has been making itself comfortable in my apartment has popped abscesses. I don't know how long they've been there; I saw the gray tabby chase her off the other day and it sounded vicious. The wounds seem to be healing well, but I don't want to take any chances in her getting bullied again, so I'm keeping her indoors for now. I'll put her in the bathroom tonight and get a litter box and other cat supplies tomorrow, plus some peroxide and polysporin for her wounds. My allergies are not happy but whatever. I'll just wash my hands a lot and limit picking her up.

Anyways, links.

Do Unpaid Internships Lead To Jobs? Not For College Students

Ellen Oh on why being a POC author sucks sometimes. A nice change from Cindy Pon's ridiculous behaviour towards fans the other day.

Kickstarter's apology. I thought it sounded great but the more I re-read it, the less I like it.

Wikipedia's List of names in English with non-intuitive pronunciations WHAT ENGLISH HOW WHY and white people make fun of non-white names?!

A Cognitive Defense of Stimming (or why Quet Hands makes math harder)

Brain study shows body clocks of depressed people are altered at cell level

I started a Watch2gether room for sewing tutorials and all the episodes of the first season of the Great British Sewing Bee, and I called it the Sewcial Justice room (we have a tag on Tumblr called that).

I moved stuff from my bedroom to my living room just so I can see how much wallspace I've got. I want to get shelves so I can just not have stuff on the floor. Also, more organization.

I also seem to have acquired another cat, a very very needy one who won't let me take a step without running to rub herself against my leg. Whenever she's in my apartment it gets kinda awkward trying to just walk cross my living room.

Tomorrow I'll hop over to JoAnn to use up my coupons, and then finally get to some reading, I hope.

Continuing the vein of the SFWA Bulletin ish, Ann Aguirre has a story about recent sexism in SFF. Delilah Dawson, a steampunk writer, recounts her encounter with an author GOH at some convention. I asked her who it was, she said John Ringo, and who the fuck is John Ringo? Anyway, he's a misogynistic asshole.

Here''s a response to the What Kind Of Asian Are You video. Apparently the guy who made the video just PRETENDS to be a white guy adopted by Japanese people?

N.K. Jemisin posted her GOH speech at CONtinuum! And from there I had to look up the 2006 thing about Slush Bombs... Rose Fox compiled a pretty good list of links and of course there's a post about it at The Angry Black Woman.

A glorious tear-down of the SFWA whatstheirfaces thing by Foz Meadows

A thing about Supergirl and why she is so interesting

Some cool patches for your jacket? It'll also help the seller get some tuition funds.

Old 2nd wave feminist manifesto: the Society for Cutting Up Men. Feels timely!

Finally getting over con crud! Here, have some links:

Man Describes Life With "Walking Corpse Syndrome"

Some company decides that it's too good for current bra measuring standards and creates its own measuring method. And it charges customers for the measuring kit. For a ready-to-wear bra. I am convinced I need to get into the bra-making business now because stuff like this irritates me so very much.

The Root: 19 Things Every HBCU Grad Knows followed by Life at HWCUs

Parents pull kids out of Boy Scouts after the Scouts allow gay kids to join

Monsanto has hired mercenary group Blackwater to target activists protesting against it

How Many Times Has Will Smith's Family Saved The World?

K. Tempest Bradford knows why ebook library lending is still a mess and you should let her tell you all about it.

So I am down with con crud (spent the day taking it easy, now it's full blown, bleh) but anyways.

Henry Morgentaler, fierce fighter for women's abortion rights in Canada, died, age 90

This couple dressed the same for 35 years. I want love like that.

Porn of real-life couples.

I will try to post panel reports soon!

The real Cosmarxpolitan: ideology and the new socialist woman in Communist women’s magazines

Being More Human. This is written by the futurist side of the duo that wrote Vintage Tomorrows, a book on steampunk that I'm in.

Geek Social Fallacies. I somehow pulled it up to talk about steampunk conventions and our con culture that's terrified of calling shit behaviour out.

DIY Aquaphonics System. I don't know why I was looking at this.

Which Plastics are Safe to use as Containers to Grow Food? Because this is apparently a thing. I have lots of milk bottles so I wanted to be sure.

A list of fast-growing vegetables.