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What do China’s internet censors actually censor? Collective action and porn. Criticize the government, except for censorship, all you like—but don’t organize for any purpose. Really interesting, and provides some perspective on Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus and my thoughts on it.
Top ten differences between white terrorists and others: 5. White terrorists are part of a “fringe.” Other terrorists are apparently mainstream.
A surprising and frightening chart about high frequency trading.
Gotye remixes YouTube covers of Somebody That I Used to Know. Or, for humor, Batman Maybe!
Podfic of my SPN gen story Ugly Duckling by![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
applegeuse. I love this concept so much and want every author to write a version.
Marta Randall, The Sword of Winter: I want to use words like “tight” or “high-strung” or “angry” to describe this little palace intrigue fantasy about a Rider (a kind of enforcer) who hates her lord/master but has sworn to attend him; now he’s dying and refusing to pick a successor, so all the candidates are trying to get her on their side—but really those adjectives are about the Rider herself. She ends up traveling with a boy who hates her because Riders killed his parents. Lots of politics; more fucking and cursing than I expected from an early 1980s book, which is probably my mistake; overall I liked it and you might too if you like your heroines justifiably pissed and not willing to play nice.
George R.R. Martin, A Song for Lya: Early collection, probably nothing must-read at the margin if you read the bigger/later collections.
Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbie, Lost Girls, books 1-3: Alice (in Wonderland), Dorothy Gale, and Wendy Darling, all grown up now, meet in a European hotel and start recounting their sexual histories. All the fantasy elements of the old stories are translated into sex, often sexual abuse, with fantasy both aiding and muting the effects of the abuse. The authors seem to want to say something about the relationship between desire, fantasy, and reality, along with sex as an alternative expression of the death wish, but I found it terribly flattening: all of the characters were the same as they dissolved into endless polymorphous perversity, including at the end the one specifically lesbian character declaring that she was going to try men because it didn’t really matter. There was a lot of mirror imagery and doubling as one fantasy slid into another or into the “reality” of the story. Images that looked nonsexual were revealed to be people fucking; casual conversations masked or ignored the sexual activities going on all around. I’m not surprised that the publisher apparently thought hard about obscenity: there’s a lot of underage sex depicted, including crossgenerational incest with young children; the worst of which is sort of disavowed by being in a book-within-the-book, about which the characters comment that it’s just fantasy, but that’s not terribly convincing in context. I don’t want to pay for shipping on PaperbackSwap to get rid of these large and heavy volumes, but if you’re in the DC area and think you might have a different opinion of the books, I’ll happily give them to you.
Top ten differences between white terrorists and others: 5. White terrorists are part of a “fringe.” Other terrorists are apparently mainstream.
A surprising and frightening chart about high frequency trading.
Gotye remixes YouTube covers of Somebody That I Used to Know. Or, for humor, Batman Maybe!
Podfic of my SPN gen story Ugly Duckling by
applegeuse. I love this concept so much and want every author to write a version.Marta Randall, The Sword of Winter: I want to use words like “tight” or “high-strung” or “angry” to describe this little palace intrigue fantasy about a Rider (a kind of enforcer) who hates her lord/master but has sworn to attend him; now he’s dying and refusing to pick a successor, so all the candidates are trying to get her on their side—but really those adjectives are about the Rider herself. She ends up traveling with a boy who hates her because Riders killed his parents. Lots of politics; more fucking and cursing than I expected from an early 1980s book, which is probably my mistake; overall I liked it and you might too if you like your heroines justifiably pissed and not willing to play nice.
George R.R. Martin, A Song for Lya: Early collection, probably nothing must-read at the margin if you read the bigger/later collections.
Alan Moore & Melinda Gebbie, Lost Girls, books 1-3: Alice (in Wonderland), Dorothy Gale, and Wendy Darling, all grown up now, meet in a European hotel and start recounting their sexual histories. All the fantasy elements of the old stories are translated into sex, often sexual abuse, with fantasy both aiding and muting the effects of the abuse. The authors seem to want to say something about the relationship between desire, fantasy, and reality, along with sex as an alternative expression of the death wish, but I found it terribly flattening: all of the characters were the same as they dissolved into endless polymorphous perversity, including at the end the one specifically lesbian character declaring that she was going to try men because it didn’t really matter. There was a lot of mirror imagery and doubling as one fantasy slid into another or into the “reality” of the story. Images that looked nonsexual were revealed to be people fucking; casual conversations masked or ignored the sexual activities going on all around. I’m not surprised that the publisher apparently thought hard about obscenity: there’s a lot of underage sex depicted, including crossgenerational incest with young children; the worst of which is sort of disavowed by being in a book-within-the-book, about which the characters comment that it’s just fantasy, but that’s not terribly convincing in context. I don’t want to pay for shipping on PaperbackSwap to get rid of these large and heavy volumes, but if you’re in the DC area and think you might have a different opinion of the books, I’ll happily give them to you.
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