Did that movie poster for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire surprise you? Apparently, this was a new online marketing gimmick in 2012 as Empire Online.com handily showed.
But what if you did the same thing for older movie posters? Then, you turn to the fine folks at The Shiznit.co.uk with their look at moving movie posters for Jaws, The Shining, Metropolis, and more.
By our organization’s current bylaws, the president of SFWA has unilateral control of, and therefore is ultimately responsible for, the organization’s publications. This includes the Bulletin. This means that when all is said and done, I personally am responsible for the Bulletin and what is published between its covers.
I have said this before but it bears repeating: This is on me, and I accept both the responsibility and criticism for it. I have some read criticism of the Bulletin’s editor Jean Rabe, so I want to be clear that Ms. Rabe, in her role as editor of Bulletin, had my full support. She took over the Bulletin at a problematic time in the publication’s history, got it back onto a regular schedule and otherwise righted what was a foundering ship. When previous concerns about sexism regarding the Bulletin were aired, specifically the cover of issue #200, Ms. Rabe listened, understood and was responsive to them and solicited work relevant to the concern, in the hope of furthering discussion. She has always acted in good faith for the organization, and I have valued and continue to value her dedication.
As publisher, I was aware that there would be two articles in Bulletin #202 about the cover of issue #200, one by Jim C. Hines and one by Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg. I did not read Mr. Hines’ piece and glanced cursorily at the Resnick/Malzberg piece but did not give it a significant read; I do not as a matter of course closely read the Bulletin before it is published. It’s possible if I had more closely read the article I might have alerted Ms. Rabe to portions that might be an issue. She might then have had the opportunity to take those concerns back to Mr. Resnick and Mr. Malzberg, who I have no reason to believe would not have taken editorial direction.
This did not happen. I as publisher gave the go-ahead—and once again, the responsibility for the event, and the offense it caused, falls on me.
So once again I apologize to the members who we have offended through the last few issues of the Bulletin. It is my place to accept the responsibility, and so my place to offer the apology.
—Outgoing SFWA President John Scalzi shows loads of class, why he was elected back in 2010, and actually apologizes in his statement on the recent debacle.
And I hope that this is the last I’ll have to report about this kind of situation regarding the SFWA from now on.
Among the good things that have come out so far regarding the problem with the most recent SFWA Bulletin is this encounter between Ursula Vernon, creator of the Digger webcomic and the Dragonbreath series of books, and John Scalzi. I’ll let Vernon speak for herself here:
SFWA announced that they’re putting a task force on fixing the Bulletin RIGHT NOW and that’s a good thing. We are hopeful!
John Scalzi said, somewhat ruefully, on Twitter that this is what he gets for thinking that the last month of his tenure as SFWA president would be quiet.
I told him that he had tempted the Fannish Misogyny Fairy with such thoughts.
He said he wanted to see an illustration.
There are very few people for whom I will whip off a spontaneous illustration, and I have to be in the right mood (my buddy Mur is still waiting for her sugar cube golem!) but all the stars aligned, I found photo ref of Hoary Marmots (because A) these are very hoary attitudes and B) if you google them, there are some marvelous shots of hoary marmots sitting around in groups, looking like grumpy old men) and…well…
Prints are available through Vernon’s website.
[Editor’s Note: This article has been partially revised from its original form at the request of the SFWA to remove material which may have infringed on a copyright.]
ETA: For some links and commentary on this issue, check out this list which Jim Hines compiled.
Considering that I’m not a member of the SFWA (Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America), anyone reading this article can take it with so much salt that they go into a self-induced hypertensive shock. But rather than add my name to the list of voices condemning writer-members Mike Resnick and Barry Malzberg for their ill-written rebuttal to critiques of their anti-feminism in the organization’s most recent quarterly newsletter, I’m going to instead talk about how the entire mess could have been avoided in the first place. And to do that, I have to throw Bulletin writer/editor Jean Rabe under a bus.
Problem #1: It all began when issues #199 and #200 of the Bulletin came out in Fall 2012 and Winter 2013 wherein as part of their ongoing dialogues about the industry, Resnick and Malzberg spoke about a certain selection of other writers and editors. Since the Bulletin is a print-only publication that’s only available to SFWA members, I only have E. Catherine Tobler’s recollection of the dialogue to go by, for now:
How fantastic, I thought, because I, being a writer and an editor and female, had a keen interest in [learning about other female writers and editors]. I love reading anthologies such as Women of Wonder (and its sequel) and seeing how women impacted and contributed to this forward-looking and -thinking genre I love. I hoped they might include the women who inspired me and introduce me to many I hadn’t yet discovered.
That’s not what I found. I found a dialogue that seemed more focused on how these “lady editors” and “lady writers” looked in bathing suits, and that they were “beauty pageant beautiful” or a “knock out.” I am certain no condescension was intended with the use of “lady,” but as the dialogues went on, I felt the word carried a certain tone—perhaps that was a fiction of my own making. As I listened to these two men talk about lady editors and writers they had known, I grew uneasy. Something wasn’t right.
ETA: Tobler graciously pointed out to me by email these paraphrased quotes from Malzberg and Resnick on “lady editors” from Issue #200, which were recapped by moderator Alessandra Kelley at the Absolute Write.com forums:
[Barry Malzberg]
Almost synchronous with her [Catherine Tarrant’s] entrance was that of Beatrice Mahaffey as Raymond Palmer’s assistant editor when Palmer left Amazing to originate a series of his own magazines (beginning with Other Worlds) and I will leave it to you to introduce her; you knew her from the SF community of your early years and were, with so many, an admirer. She was competent, unpretentious, and beauty pageant gorgeous … as photographs make quite clear. Tell succeeding generations all about her, please.
Mike
Ah, Bea Mahaffey…
She was the only pro I knew in Cincinnati when we moved here from the Chicago area more than a third of a century ago. She was incredibly generous with her time and reminiscences, and I spent a lot of time with her, on the phone and in person, duting the first few months when I was learning my way around town.
Anyone who’s seen photos of Bea from the 1950s knows she was a knockout as a young woman.
and
[Mike Resnick:] Another story is from nonagenarian Margaret Keiffer, who lives just a couple of miles from us. She’s the widow of super-fan Don Ford, who ran the 1949 Worldcon, and founded both Midwestcon and First Fandom. Don also created CFG (the Cincinnati Fantasy Group), the venerable local club to which Carol and I belong. According to Margaret, during its first few years of existence CFG was populated exclusively by men. Then Bea joined. Then the members’ wives got a look at Bea in her swimsuit at the 1950 Midwestcon. Then the club’s makeup changed to the 50% men and 50% women that has existed ever since.
Where Jean Rabe Went Wrong, #1: Having just learned through incoming president Steven Gould that Rabe was appointed to be editor of the Bulletin by outgoing president John Scalzi then-president Russell Davis when previous issues were months late, I can understand that there’s a chance that Rabe may not have gotten a good chance to read and review that particular Resnick/Malzberg dialogue too carefully before it went to press. Which is minor fault number one. But the even bigger fault is not recognizing that publishing such an article without a balancing viewpoint was a disservice to the membership.
I believe that as the editor of a professional trade organization’s newsletter, it’s Rabe’s job to ensure that not only does the magazine come out on time, but that it addresses the membership as a whole, from the old veterans who can remember casual conversations with Robert Heinlein to the new writers who have just become eligible for membership by selling their third piece of prose, from the “old white guys” who pioneered the genre conventions to the new non-white, non-male members who are finding new ways to address those conventions.
Many of these new writers are women, and many of them are vocal about expressing their displeasure about misogyny in the fandom. Many of them are men who have been just as vocal in decrying sexism in the industry. Rabe should have known about both of these factors and should have had a response from the SFWA addressing those issues as an article from one of the women mentioned regarding her experiences in the industry or a current female writer/editor talking about how things have changed since Resnick and Malzberg’s time. If there wasn’t enough time to solicit either of those articles, then possibly this lack of representation could have been mentioned in a “Letter from the Editor” asking for an alternate commentary on those times. And those members would have been mollified or at least pleased to know that their voices were as important as Resnick and Malzberg’s, that their SFWA membership money wasn’t going to an organization that didn’t acknowledge views that were important to them.
The worst part of all is that this isn’t the first time the SFWA has had problems with some of its older members doing or saying things that are misogynistic and offensive in the 21st century, as the the reaction surrounding the Harlan Ellison boob grab from the 2006 Hugo Award ceremony shows. (A copy of Ellison’s “apology” can be found here; proof that Ellison didn’t really apologize can be read in this comment on an unrelated entry on Scalzi’s blog.) Having “survived” that issue, an editor with a little bit of foresight would have been aware that this could be an issue with its membership again, and any steps to curtail it would have been seen as a public relations coup.
Problem #2: On the cover of Issue #200 was a barbarian standing over a downed giant, sword liberally coated in blood. But it wasn’t just any old barbarian.
Where Jean Rabe Went Wrong, #2: At the 2012 Hugo Award ceremony, writer Jim C. Hines won the Best Fan Writer award, and this is how he accepted it:
That spine-twisting pose is a nod to the series of blog posts he wrote beginning in January 2012 about the problem with many science fiction and fantasy book covers, which along with the help of Scalzi and four other SFWA members, he turned into a charity fundraiser to benefit the Aicardi Syndrome Foundation in honor of a friend’s child who died. (Ironically, in the comments to the blog post about the big group pose is a mention by commenter badducky about Bulletin #200.)
Rabe—who certainly would have been aware of Hines’ win in 2012 and what he wrote about which made him worthy of the nomination—should have thought twice about making the cover of the 200th issue an image of a woman in improbable armor. Or, if as Tobler sympathetically suggests the cover was meant to evoke a sense of nostalgia towards what fantasy covers used to look like, perhaps this should have been mentioned in that same “Letter from the Editor.” Again, any comment from Rabe would have been welcome and defused the tension surrounding the second half of the Resnick/Malzberg dialogues, but to my knowledge that didn’t happen.
Where Jean Rabe Went Right, #1: If there’s something that Rabe did correctly, it was to include an essay by Jim Hines called “Cover Art and the Radical Notion that Women Are People” in a subsequent issue, #202. But as you’ll read, by then it was “too little, too late.”
Problem #3: Issue #201 was the Spring 2013 issue, and it included an article by writer C.J. Henderson. According to writer Betsy Dornbusch, Henderson wrote about “staying power and reinventing oneself for career longevity.” And yet, he used an interesting example to illustrate his point:
The reason for Barbie’s unbelievable staying power, when every contemporary and wanna-be has fallen by the way-side is, she’s a nice girl. Let the Bratz girls dress like tramps and whores. Barbie never had any of that. Sure, there was a quick buck to be made going that route but it wasn’t for her. Barbie got her college degree, but she never acted as if it was something owed to her, or that Ken ever tried to deny her.
She has always been a role model for young girls, and has remained popular with millions of them throughout their entire lives, because she maintained her quiet dignity the way a woman should. [emphasis by Dornbusch]
Where Jean Rabe Went Wrong, #3: Dornbusch laid out very well exactly what’s wrong with Henderson’s premise and why it’s faulty to hold up Barbie as a positive role model of longevity, so I’m not going to repeat it. However, it’s an editor’s job to review every piece prior to publication to see if the writer is making claims that the organization can’t defend, especially the opinion pieces.
And if indeed a writer does make claims that aren’t easily defensible, it’s an editor’s job to note that while the publication stands by the writer’s right to his/her opinion, that it’s not the opinion of the organization as a whole. Again, such a statement—either behind the scenes in the private forums for SFWA members or a public notice on the website—would have gone a long way towards defusing the issue; as far as I researched, nothing to this effect was done by Rabe or the board of directors. If Locus editor-in-chief Liza Groen Trombi can admit to her editorial mistakes regarding an ill-written April Fools’ joke, why are Jean Rabe and the Bulletin above reproach regarding misogyny?
Problem #4: Recently published in Summer 2013, issue #202 contained a “rebuttal” by Resnick and Malzberg to the criticisms of their dialogue from issue #200; in the real world, Rabe probably would have been fired for letting the situation come to this point. As noted earlier, the issue contains a piece written by Hines which was probably prompted by the debate on the cover art from #200, but it was overbalanced by the somewhat incomprehensible back-and-forth between Resnick and Malzberg. Special thanks go to Natalie at Radish Reviews who had been able to obtain low-res images of the article so that both SFWA members and non-members could read and discuss the outrageous statements like this one from Barry Malzberg regarding the detractors:
What makes this statement outrageous is Malzberg’s partial assumption that because there are some people who wished that the article had not been published in the Bulletin, then the injured parties may have wanted to suppress his and Resnick’s words. Of course, he retreats from committing himself to that false agenda (“to my knowledge that is not at the time part of the complainers’ agenda”), but by throwing in the word “suppression” he deliberately and mistakenly calls into mind an image of a specter of Senator Joe McCarthy or something Orwellian.
There’s also this statement by Mike Resnick, referring to the cover of issue #200, which I’ll return to later:
Both Natalie and Jason Sanford do an excellent job in explaining exactly why the latest Resnick/Malzberg dialogue is offensive, so I’m not going to go into it here. At this stage, however, I think that once writers start throwing around claims that they’re being “censored” in an opinion piece and calling their critics “liberal fascists,” it’s time to review with those writers what censorship actually means from a legal standpoint and how to properly respond to critiques written on the Internet.
I point to attorney and blogger Ken White at Popehat who in 2009 had to create a special tag for articles on the site about “thin skinned weenies” who were claiming that their First Amendment rights were being violated. White’s first paragraph explaining the new tag is as follows:
Let’s be clear—the right to free speech is the right to express oneself without state retaliation. It is not a right to speak without social retaliation. Speech has consequences. Among those consequences are condemnation, vituperation, scorn, ridicule, and pariah status. Those consequences represent other people exercising their free speech rights. That’s a feature of the marketplace of ideas, not a bug.
From the U.S. Bill of Rights:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances. [emphasis mine]
As no one from either of the gentlemen’s home states has introduced a bill into either the House or Senate asking that Mike Resnick and/or Barry Malzberg be prohibited for writing in the Bulletin about “lady writers” and “lady editors,” neither of them can credibly claim that they’re being censored. The fact that Rabe even gave them an opportunity to revisit the subject in issue #202 is proof that the editorial board of the Bulletin is encouraging their right to speak freely about their previous comments.
But instead of letting Resnick and Malzberg’s purple pens get away from them, Rabe should have done the following:
That way, Resnick could not have gotten away with his above statement regarding romance novel covers. And while it may probably have a grain of truth within it, that doesn’t mean that readers and fans aren’t as critical of romance novel covers and their sociological implications as Hines was in his essay and blog posts on science fiction and fantasy covers. In fact, a quick Google search brought up this article written in 1999, which can also incidentally be taken as proof that when it comes to decrying sexism in book covers, the romance readers were ahead of the curve. And let’s not forget this entire category of posts by the women behind Smart Bitches, Trashy Books. There’s even an entire doctoral dissertation on romance novel covers (link goes to a PDF), written by Dr. Jayashree Kamble in 2008.
If I could find those articles and/or have those references at my fingertips within the six hours it has taken me thus far to write this article, surely Rabe or one of her associate editors could have done the same amount of research—or more—and found better examples to show to Resnick and let him know that his rationale was faulty and how he could make his piece stronger.
Because that’s the other job of an editor: to point out where things don’t make any sense and most importantly, help make a writer’s work much stronger. And I think this is the most egregious error that Rabe committed: she left her writers out to hang themselves with their own words.
As of this writing, the SWFA announced on its website the creation of a task force “to look at the Bulletin and to determine how the publication needs to proceed from this point in order to be a valuable and useful part of the SFWA member experience.” At the same time, Scalzi made statements on Twitter which he collected in a post on his personal blog; as per his policy, he is not accepting comments on this matter on his personal blog, but by email at president@sfwa.org.
The task force also aims to “solicit further, detailed opinions from the membership as a whole about the Bulletin as part of an upcoming stage of the project.” I know that I’m not a SFWA member, but in sending a link to this article to vice president Rachel Swirsky and Scalzi as part of their work on this task force, I hope that what I’ve written can help them make the Bulletin a newsletter that the present and future membership can be proud of.
Without context, I present to you the cutest little meta-cosplayer, ever. cosmicbrownie on Tumblr found this little sweetheart at Motor City Comic Con last weekend, and she’s taken the Internet by storm.
[There] is one meeting [with fans at the recent Megacon] that stands out, that moved me so much, I’ve been struggling to find the right words to recount it. On Saturday, a young woman walked up to my table with her husband and her two children. She handed me a typed letter and told me that she knew she wouldn’t be able to get through what she wanted to say to me, and would I please read it.
I unfolded it, and read her story. When she was a young girl, she had a serious complication due to her Lupus, and her doctors told her that she would never walk again. She had a photo of me, though, that she took with her to physical therapy every day, and the therapists would hold it up for her and encourage her to walk toward it—toward me—while she recovered. She made a promise to herself, she said, that she would walk again some day, and if I was ever in her town, she would walk up to meet me. At the end of her letter, she thanked me for being there, so she could walk to meet me.
I looked up at her through tears, and she looked back at me through her own. I stood up, walked around my table, and put about fifteen feet between us. I held my arms open, and asked her to walk over to me. She began to cry, and slowly, confidently closed the distance between us. I embraced her, and we stood there for a minute, surrounded by thousands of people who had no idea what was going on, and cried together.
“I’m so proud of you,” I said, quietly, “and I am so honored.”
We wiped the tears away, and I sat back down to sign a photo for her. I looked at her young children. “Your mom is remarkable,” I said, “and I know you don’t get it, because she’s, like your mom? But you have to trust me: she is.”
The kids nodded, and I could tell that they were a little freaked out by the emotion of the thing, even if they didn’t understand it. They looked at their father, who said, “Mommy’s okay. Mommy’s okay.” That made me tear up again. Mommy was okay, and she is a remarkable woman who defied the odds and her doctors, and walked up to meet me. I’m still overwhelmed when I think about what that means, and how I was part of it.
ETA: All is mostly well! Update at the end.
On a night when an old white guy and a younger white guy are debating over which of their respective political ideals purport to help create more jobs in the U.S., it’s very easy to be caught up in their rhetoric and ignore the reality that faces the people who have found themselves out of work and desperately trying to keep things going another day.
An example that hits very close to home for me is that of Kevin Lillard, one of the first to document North American cosplay enthusiasts and anime conventions at his now-defunct website “A Fan’s View.” His website was most active in the late 1990s and early 2000s where he would criss-cross the United States to take photographs of cosplayers, panelists, events, and many more of the activities that surround an average anime convention.
However, after a round of layoffs at the Indianapolis Star where he had been a reporter for over 18 years, Lillard became homeless, and was forced to live out of his car. This Facebook message, written in the middle of the day on October 12 details how poor his situation currently is:
Out of work and out of money, I’ve been living in my car for the last month, spending days at a nearby library, sending out mostly ignored online job applications. Already there’s no money to buy food and the last things to eat were some peanuts from a vending machine at the Anderson newspaper where I had my last job interview. I spent my last change to make a 50-cent call at a pay phone hoping to speak to a recruiter and reached only voice mail. The car where I’ve been living started running out of fuel on the way to the library and I barely got there. With no money there will be no fuel and no way to go from place to place. Even if there is another job offer there will be no way to get there,with no money and no fuel. Unless there’s some sort of miracle,this is the end of any hopes I had. All of the prayers have been answered with messages of failure. This is where we have learned what God really wants.
But it didn’t used to be that way.
Armed with an amateur’s love for photography and a fan’s love for the medium of Japanese animation, it wasn’t unusual to look at Kevin Lillard’s homegrown website on a Friday to see coverage from a convention in one part of the country and on Sunday to see coverage from a complete different convention several hundred—sometimes even thousands—of miles away. That, along with Lillard’s recurring “convention personality of the week” feature kept thousands of people coming back to his site time and time again. (Disclaimer: Kevin once named me a Cosplay Personality of the Week despite the fact that I never actually did any cosplay. I can’t help it if I ran with the “It” crowd back in the day, can I?)
Lillard was a tireless photographer who tried to attend every major event at a convention, which is why it came as a major shock when in 2006 he suffered from a heart attack while covering Ohayocon. This, coupled with an incident at Ikkicon in Austin, Texas in 2009 (scroll down to Saturday) lead to Lillard pulling a decade’s worth of coverage from the web and returning to another love of his, photographing (and announcing) at car races at the Indianapolis Speedrome.
However, according to his LinkedIn profile, Lillard left that job at the same time as the layoff from the Star and as a freelancer, it’s highly doubtful that he had any significant amount of savings. The folks at American Cosplay Paradise have put up a PayPal donation button here where the funds will go directly to Lillard; others are helping by helping gather a list of resources for him to help him get back on his feet.
But I think what would help Kevin Lillard the most would be a job. I mean, look at these photos, taken over several years, at races, during events like basketball games, air shows, and craft shows. Any blog media group worth their page views should be storming down his door to hire him to be their “man on the scene.” If I had the money, I’d fly him out to cover the upcoming New York Comic Con for me; that’s how much I trust in his skills at going in, shooting the story, and uploading the material to a website.
Here’s hoping.
Update: 10/12/2012 Less than 24 hours after the first wave of messages started whizzing around Facebook and the anime convention sphere, Kevin Lillard had this to report:
The old saying of how things are darkest just before the dawn has been proven true with my amazing experiences of the last day. It’s humbling to have to beg and even more humbling to see the outpouring of support in my case. The donations through PayPal have been far beyond anything I could have expected. There’s far more than enough to get me back on my feet and housed for a long time, so I won’t need anything else. If you want to make a donation now, find a local charity that offers real help to the homeless, because there are countless people on the streets who have nothing close to the network of friends that I learned that I have. Fortunately the size of the generosity that you have shown will make it possible for me to send some of the donations to an umbrella agency in this area that works to help the homeless, so they’ll be better prepared to assist those who seem to be in a hopeless predicament. Again, many many thanks.
Honestly, anyone would want to have this guy as an employee, right?
ETA: More pics added below mine!
After a busy year which involved Debbie Gibson serenading him on his 40th birthday, playing board games with Colin Ferguson and chatting about aliens with Noah Wyle, raising over $10,000 to aid homeless doggies and kitties in need, re-launching his blog on his own website, and being able to tell his shipmates how much he really loves them for the first time since he was 18, Wil Wheaton and his wonderful wife Anne decided to go to Hawaii for a private vacation.
And despite his re-emergence into the mainstream public eye courtesy of recurring guest appearances on shows like “The Big Bang Theory,” “Leverage,” and “Eureka,” where he gets to relish in playing “evil”, I still find it hard to believe that the Wil Wheaton we know as that guy who loves brewing beer, telling stories through words and film, and being generally geeky is a celebrity.
It’s something that Wheaton’s gotten used to over the years, and he’s certainly had his share of “crazy” and “scary” fan moments—but I don’t think that even Wil Wheaton ever thought that he’d be stalked by the paparazzi while on vacation. I’ll let him explain:
We’ve had an absolutely amazing trip, relaxing and reading and swimming and having beers and mostly just enjoying that, after a year spent mostly apart due to my work, we finally get ten days together.
Well, today, a shitbag decided to intrude on our private vacation. He set himself up on the beach where we’re staying, pulled out a telephoto lens, and decided to take pictures of us for hours this morning.
I saw this guy around 10 this morning, and I thought to myself, “No, that guy isn’t taking my picture; I’m just being paranoid. Nobody cares about me enough to camp out on a beach and take that kind of paparazzi picture.”
Around 3, Anne and I got up from the beach, and walked back to our condo to make lunch. I saw the same guy, in the same place, with the same camera. I sort of glared at him, and he said something to me that I couldn’t hear.
“What?” I said.
“I said, ‘thank you, Wil.’” He said.
“Dude, I’m on vacation, and taking pictures like that of me and my wife isn’t cool. Would you please delete them?” I said.
“Sorry, brah,” he said, “I gotta make a living.”
“Are you serious?” I said. “I’m just trying to be on vacation with my wife, man.”
“Sorry, brah,” he said.
I absorbed the reality of what this parasite had done, and I said, “Go fuck yourself, you piece of shit.”
“Hey, if you don’t like it, go home, brah,” he said.
I was enraged. I was shaking and sick to my stomach. I walked back to my condo, and ate a sandwich (delicious PB&J with Guava Jam!) while I processed the invasion of my privacy I’d just experienced.
I was furious that this piece of shit would spend hours sitting on a beach, taking I don’t even know how many pictures of us, and then have the audacity to tell me that I should just go home if I didn’t like it. Like I was in the wrong for expecting to enjoy some time on the beach without some fucking creep using a telephoto lens to take pictures of me.
But of course, rather than continue to let his vacation be ruined by this breach in privacy and courtesy, he and his wife decided to ruin the chance that the creepy stalker photos will ever be purchased by publishing their own photos of themselves in their bathing suits.
And then… the Internet got creative in that way that only a geek-defending, Photoshop and GIMP-happy, meme-creating Internet can:
And, of course, I had to get my kicks in as well:
I can’t wait to see what other ‘shops come out of this. ETA: I hit “Publish” too soon…
Yes, I know I’m a little late to this, but my recreational browsing has taken some hits recently and I haven’t been able to goof off on the Internet as much as I’d like to. I did finally get a chance to see one of the latest viral music videos to sweep my Facebook page; now, I’m wondering why the hell it took me so long:
In addition to containing the kind of infectious booty-shaking bass beat that I’ve craved since Justin Timberlake brought “Sexyback,” the number one reason why I love this music video is the pure combined sense of machismo, dance-like-no-one’s-watching, and “This is why I’m legendary,” all in one package. Korean rapper Park Jae Sung exudes a joie de vivre in this video that I haven’t see in a long while. At the same time, it helps to promote the idea that you don’t have to be super fit or a dancer all your life in order to move your body well on a dance floor—something that might be soothing or helpful to those of you out there who are afraid of looking like an idiot when you’re dancing.
In short, I wish that more people would just get up and dance and have fun like this, and I hope to be able to add more tracks from PSY to my iPod.
Any words of wisdom for Kaitlyn Leeb, the actress who inherited your role, who already seems to be struggling with the same sort of fan interest?
Be nice to your fans and keep your legs crossed. Blouse open. But legs crossed.
—Lycia Naff, who played the original three-breasted prostitute in 1990’s Total Recall, gives advice to her successor in this year’s Total Recall remake. (With additional props to The Awl’s Tom Blunt for quickly scoring that interview.)
One of the things that is the source of the Internet’s greatest power is the rabbit hole effect, wherein when you’re looking at one thing, you click a link, see something else, maybe do a search, and then end up at a totally awesome thing that you’ve never seen before.
For me, the rabbit hole began while watching Part 6 in the “Let’s Play” of Cursed Crusade from Loading Ready Run and then heading over to the comments on the forum post, which lead to the “Crash Course” episode on The Crusades, and from there I started to wonder how and why John Green got to be so funny, which lead to finding out about the 2007 web project he conducted with his brother Hank called Brotherhood 2.0.
See, brothers John and Hank Green decided that they conversed entirely too much by text (emails, IMs, text messages, etc.) and for a whole year decided that they would only communicate in means which didn’t involve text and/or written words. This meant that for a year, one brother would upload a video to the shared YouTube channel vlogbrothers talking about his day and the next day, the other brother would reply. (There were also phone calls and possibly in-person meetings as well, but that’s not germane to the thesis of the project.) There were punishments involved for violating the rules/concepts for the project which would also be captured on video and uploaded to the channel. There are two playlists of videos on the channel for the initial project and several more concerning the side projects and what happened when the brothers decided to continue doing the vlog (Oh, God, I hate that word so much).
One of the reasons why I’m drawn to Brotherhood 2.0 is that it’s a glorious collaboration between two witty people, another is how quickly things scale all the way up to dangerously silly. So far, I’ve only seen 25 of the 200 videos from the first part of 2007, and my favorite moments so far include the improvised songs (because I do that to make my boyfriend laugh all the time) and seeing the brothers interact with the world around them in their intros. Also, the “In your pants” game is one that I’m definitely going to have to play with our current library.
I can’t recall when I started watching these, but I can definitely tell you that this is one series that I’m going to be watching for quite some time.
After I saw the movie, my 13-year-old daughter asked me if I was “team Peeta or team Gale,” referring to the District 12 boy who is Katniss’s “star-crossed” lover in the Hunger Games arena and her hunky best pal back home. The question also evokes Twilight,” of course, which has gotten a lot of fan-girl mileage out of the competitive objectification of Jacob and Edward.
For the record I always thought Bella should ditch the pouty, sparkly bloodsucker and run with the wolves, though as a grown-up film critic I know I’m supposed to remain neutral. But I have to say that it did not occur to me, watching The Hunger Games,” to think very much about who Katniss’s boyfriend should be. She seemed to have more important things to worry about — and also, to bring it back to Leatherstocking and his kind, to be a fundamentally solitary kind of heroine.
—New York Times film critic A.O. Scott on what makes The Hunger Games movie (and book) different from Twilight.
I know it’s been a while since I’ve written in this blog, and quite a lot has happened since the last time I was able to work on it. A few more responsibilities were added to my day job and while having the increased responsibility is awesome because it means my new employers trust me, it also means that I don’t have a lot of time to geek out over anything.
Saturdays are one of my days to relax, recuperate, and psych myself up for the work week to come. After wiping my FemShep original Mass Effect character in order to start a DudeShep run for the Commander Shepherd challenge, I got to Feros after surveying all the surveyable planets (and leveling up again) and decided that I’d take a break and perhaps pick it up tomorrow.
I also wanted to check and see if my friend Harris “Dr. Nerdlove” O’Malley had posted the article to which I contributed a bit of writing, and knowing how way leads on to way on the Internet, a review of his very popular article on why Twilight is a horrible example to draw upon for pictures of healthy relationships lead me down the rabbit hole onto a commenter’s blog entries about how she lost her faith in God…
…and reminded me of the Victoria Bitter/Jordan Wood fiasco.
To recap, the year was 2001 and the first of the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings trilogy movies came out. Many Tolkein fans were pleased and elated with how good the movies were, and several new fans started becoming interested in the mythos thanks to the movies. These new fans were different from other Ringers fans who came before them in that they had access to the Internet and LiveJournals which which to connect to other fans and share their love of the work, and PayPal to send money to those fans in different parts of the world who professed that they were down on hard times.
Through a series of convoluted events, it came out that a person who called herself Victoria Bitter started to believe some very strange things about herself and felt that she was actually a man—not just any man, but actor Elijah Wood’s cousin. Billing herself now as the male Jordan Wood, he hooked up with another LotR fan in Oregon and in the guise of doing good, ended up defrauding a lot of people out of money and incurring the wrath of three actors from New Zealand and the state of Oregon.
You can read more about the entire saga here; if you do a Google search, it’s one of the most interesting rabbit holes you’ll find yourself falling into. The most tragic part is that Amy Player/Victoria Bitter/Jordan Wood/new identity Andrew Blake’s manipulative ways allegedly resulted in a May 2011 double-murder/suicide in which Blake escaped with only a shot to the foot. But that’s what I learned later while doing the research for this post.
When I first clicked through to Abbey Stone’s blog where she writes as KumquatWriter from a comment she left in Dr. Nerdlove’s blog, I found this very interesting series of posts about how she became an atheist. And it was while reading Part Four that I started to think, “Now, why does this sound familiar to me?” By Part Five, the whole thing comes out and it’s the comments to that blog post that I want to highlight.
Jeanine Renne, the author of When a Fan Hits the Shit and the most prominent of the muckrakers who uncovered the details behind the Bit of Earth charity scam, is the sixth person to comment on Stone’s entry and it’s evident that even a decade later, she was still angry about what happened:
I agree completely that Amy is a master manipulator. Little Sam also described the cultish atmosphere “Jordan” created just like you did. But nowhere in this blog, Abbey, do I see any acknowledgement of the things YOU did, to contribute to this situation. Do you accept any responsibility for the lies you told? Do you even admit to them? Because you delivered some whoppers, Abbey.
You attacked your former friends, sometimes at their place of work, calling them vicious names and telling them in no uncertain terms to go to hell. Maybe you were only doing it because “Jordan” brainwashed you… but YOU did it. Have you accepted any responsibility for hurting those people? Do you even admit to it? Because I’ve talked to at least 3 of them, and they were all shocked and deeply hurt.
About a half an hour later, Stone responded directly to Renne:
Yes. I lied. A whole lot. And of COURSE I’m willing to take responsibility for it; that’s what recovery fucking means. I own my stupid choices. I’ve apologized to people I am genuinely sorry for hurting,and many of them have forgiven me, and we’ve moved forward with our friendships.
I’m not replying to your entire comment tonight, because I am busy celebrating my son’s birthday, and I’ll be damned if I’m going back to the worst time in my life just because today is the day you happened to read my blog. Especially when you fucking called him my “spawn” on your own journal. I’ll give your “hot seat” a post of its very own in the next couple of days, when I have the time
I’m giving this much of a reply so you know I read it and am not hiding. Not anymore, not from you. You aren’t my dirty little secret, given that I talk VERY openly about what I did and went through, INCLUDING my guilt.
Oh, and just FYI. I’m the one who tipped you off to Andrew Blake. I knew you’d be the best revenge, and you were.
Renne loved that last line in Stone’s reply because to her it was a wonderful ironic twist. I love it because it shows that Stone truly repentant about what she did. Rather than turn a blind eye when she noticed that other people were possibly going to fall victim to Blake’s manipulations, Stone took steps towards making sure that other people knew about it and could either stop it or help get Blake’s potential victims.
A day later, both Stone and Renne reached a sort of detente, but Stone goes one step further after writing a partially apologetic post to detail exactly what happened the day she stopped believing in Jordan Wood’s lies; after that, Renne was able to finally let her anger at Stone go.
And that’s how you resolve a fight on the Internet: You apologize sincerely, prove that you’re repentant, and move on.
Is it really that hard to do?
If the movie is set in Philadelphia, why aren’t you filming it in Philadelphia? Admittedly, when I visited Glasgow, one of my first comments was that it reminded me of Philadelphia. But even so, Philadelphia itself would be a better stage for a story supposedly taking place in the City of Brotherly Love. Besides, your extras in Glasgow are going to have the wrong incomprehensible accent.
—LiveJournal Daily Quiz co-moderator Angledge has some issues with the shooting location for the movie adaptation of World War Z where filming has already begun.
Rainbow Dash and Rarity could not be more different, and yet they are both girls. Rainbow Dash is not presented as wrong for being athletic and having no interest in fashion, nor is Rarity presented as wrong for being more stereotypically girly and interested in cats, clothes, and jewelry.
This was a revelation to me, as sad as that may be! Think of the variety of male presentations in those shows that have a Smurfette: little boys can watch them and learn to be a strong, silent leader, a brave hero, or a witty intellectual. Girls watch themselves be summarized down to a single word whose presentation might not fit. But in [My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic], there are a half-dozen main girls who are all distinct, all respected, and all work together after they move past the natural friction caused by their differences.
—World of Warcraft guildmaster and Glee fanfic author Miggy explains why Ponies aren’t just for Bronies.