This morning I saw an indie pub cover that’s so bad it makes me want to cry (no, I’m not going to tell you what it is). Everything about is bad. There are at least 4 focal point elements, meaning there are none. The colors are garish. The text treatment is illegible. The background is too busy. There’s so much decent pre-made cover art (ie, art that indie cover artist/designers have done for the fun of it/to sell on spec rather than because they’re making it specifically for a hired…
A friend of mine over on Facebook posted link to this article, Why Women Smile At Men Who Sexually Harass Us, which is a good article full of things that are tiresomely familiar to virtually all women and apparently continue to be surprising to many, perhaps most, men. I think it’s a good article for men to read, because what prompted her writing it was how the author’s boyfriend, who is, by her estimation, one of the good guys, responded not only to her being harassed, but to her *reaction*…
I should not even post this, because it is a shitstorm in the making, but OMG. Sharon Lee/ of Sharon Lee & Steve Miller is doing an open Q&A, and posts a response to a question about fan fiction over here. Fan fiction is an incredibly touchy topic, and I thought Sharon responded with an enormous amount of grace and intelligence in her explanation of why she doesn’t like or support fan fiction of their universe. I should not, of course, have read the trackback links on the blog entry.…
Friend of mine over on Twitter accidentally set me off on Women In Refrigerators by asking what it was about Rachel’s death in The Dark Knight that upset me so much. It’s that they fucking killed her. She’s the only woman in the first two movies and they fucking killed her for the angst of the hero(es). I’m the only person on earth who liked Katie Holmes’s Rachel more than Maggie Gyllenhaal’s, and I was still so pissed and upset over it that I can’t watch the movie again, despite…
Look, I don’t know why it is that I get bent out of shape more easily over injustices in comicbookland than in sffland, but I pretty much do. I’ve certainly identified myself as a SFF reader longer (although by only half a decade or so, probably), but somehow comics tend to hit me right in the outrage. Here is today’s link hitting me in the outrage. The short version is that it’s Mark Millar (whom I have met and who is *insanely* charming in person), Todd McFarlane, Len Wein (the…