Autumn is In the Air Blogaround

It's not like this past summer was sweltering for most of the time - in fact, it was the best summer in recent memory as far as I'm concerned - but after the 17-month winter we had I must admit my bones feel like they never really warmed up.  Yesterday morning I woke up with the fan on and the window open (as we're wont to do when the weather is in the '50s and '60s) and my feet were freezing. Guess it's time for the colder-weather socks! It's also time to get back to writing, so let's start by clearing my blogaround bookmarks!

• Liss is back! Nuff said.


• It's time for yet another round of misogyny - but then, isn't it always? - and Phoebe-Jane Boyd gets down and dirty on The Mary Sue preparing for yet another Frank Miller whorefest (which nobody seemed to like much). And anyone looking for a thorough rehash of the Spider-Woman Butt Thing would do well to peruse Adam Sorice's overview, also at The Mary Sue. And Heidi has a depressing roundup of other attacks on women in pop culture.


• And if you think this is just culture-war stuff, try being a woman in the tech industry, and weep (silently of course) at Kevin Drum's chart about feedback during critical performance reviews. Or in politics, where Echidne points out the myriad ways in which "women hav[e] less authority" and "are questioned more and believed less readily." Or involved in the sciences and having to deal with the mansplaining Richard Dawkins (PZ does yeoman's work here, as well as here where it seems Dawkins has joined the Hoff Sommers cult) or the creepy-sounding Michael Shermer (again, via PZ), or movement atheism with folks like Sam Harris and David Silverman around.


• Via Arthur, I'm not sure I agree that love is not enough. I mean, I get Mark Manson's points, but really, love is the foundation and without that none of the other stuff matters. That to me was kind of the point of "All You Need is Love" - Not that it's the only thing, but that it has to be the main all-encompassing thing or the rest is pointless. And the way he seemingly had to add "but Lennon was an a-hole" just seems really dickish. People are contradictory, we all contain multitudes; Lennon could be a staunch feminist and atheist and everything else he became as a result of his marriage to Yoko and still be an a-hole. It doesn't obviate the song or its beautiful meaning.


• Speaking of a-holes, I should have known there were different varieties, like the Schröedinger's a-hole.


• News flash: Rich people still think poor people are failures, but as Lance Mannion points out life itself is full of little struggles and failures and, being human, that knowledge ought to create more compassion in us. Also from Lance, Christians who "feel their Constitutional rights are violated when they are not free to violate the Constitutional rights of anybody and everybody who doesn’t adhere to their version of Christianity."


• I see a lot of outrage over the Daniele Watts matter, but I'd like to know who made the original 9-1-1 call that legally obliged the cop to ask for Watts' ID, which she refused to give him resulting in her being handcuffed. Even if she and Lucas were doing the nasty in their car, and even if the cop is telling the truth that he had no intention of arresting her until she verbally hauled off at him, Watts has clearly experienced a lot of racist incidents in her past, which colored (pun unintended) her encounter with him. I can't see how this might have gone any differently. Maybe if the 9-1-1 caller had minded his/her own business? I see excessive PDA all the time and don't care for it all that much either, but my solution is usually to look away (although when I was younger it took the form of under-the-breath snarky remarks).


• Wil Wheaton celebrates the 48th anniversary of Star Trek by running The Big Goodbye on his blog.


• How do internet conversations work at the moment? Abi at Making Light has some good observations. And I've never heard of snackwave, being probably four decades too old for the crowd, but Hazel Cills and Gabrielle Noone cover it well enough for me to feel slightly less out of touch. Seems like something I would have liked at that age.


• Kath David talks about Being the Other at conventions - becoming a sort of fannish elder by virtue of experience and/or relationships. I'm starting to feel the same way; I'll be most of the folks at New York Comic Con next month will never even have heard of Friends of Lulu (an organization that's thankfully no longer needed, in my opinion, its purpose having been fulfilled by the slow arc of history bending towards gender justice), let alone what fandom was like in the Usenet days or even pre-Image.


• Lastly, for anyone asking what Robin's up to now, Cliff Meth has the details. Pretty cool, huh?

As mentioned above, we'll be at the NYCC(same booth as before, B6, right next to Peter and Kath David in B5 once again) if you want to inquire further!