RivkaT

Relevant to your interests?: What is going on with the accents in Game of Thrones?

( Brandon Sanderson, Scott Westerfeld, P.D. James as AustenCollapse )

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( spoilers run in my veinsCollapse )

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( long review of Evgeny Morozov, short review of another big data bookCollapse )

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It’s Not Like That at All
Takes place post S8, in a time of blissful peace. Because I couldn’t not. Girl!Dean/Charlie Bradbury. PG-13. Title from Star Wars, of course.
Thanks to giandujakiss for beta.


( count me in.Collapse )

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I’m finally catching up with SPN, and  ( spoilers for 8x20Collapse )

From the department of ‘I don’t know quite how I feel about that’: I met a fellow XF fan who told me, “I read Iolokus when I was fourteen and it changed my life!” I told her that we were very angry at the time, and she indicated that she’d been able to tell. (Additional note to self: I’m old.)

From Deadspin: “You may have heard that the highest-paid employee in each state is usually the football coach at the largest state school. This is actually a gross mischaracterization: Sometimes it is the basketball coach.”

Interesting fan-relevant argument from Jess Nevins about why Lovecraft became canonized and other, better writers of the period didn’t (the second reason strikes me as dependent on context-specific definitions of “first” relating to the rise of copyright, but is still worthy of consideration):

Lovecraft escaped the fate of the vast majority of writers — obscurity, to a greater or lesser degree — through several extra-literary events. … Lovecraft’s letter writing … was critical in establishing Lovecraft as a literary presence to his contemporaries. Lovecraft was an extraordinary correspondent, writing an estimated hundred thousand letters in his lifetime, to fans and fellow writers, especially those working for the pulp Weird Tales. Decades before the social media, Lovecraft used letter writing to create a presence for himself in the consciousness of fans and writers and to create the social capital that paid off after his death.
Too, Lovecraft was the first author to create an open-source fictional universe. The crossover, the meeting between two or more characters from discrete texts, is nearly as old as human culture, beginning with the Greeks if not the Sumerians. The idea of a fictional universe open to any creator who wants to take part in it is considerably newer. French authors like Verne and Balzac had created the idea of a single universe linked through multiple texts, and following them, the dime novels and story papers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had established the idea of ongoing fictional universes, but those universes were limited to magazines published by the original stories’ publishers. It was Lovecraft who first created a fictional universe that anyone was welcome to take part in. Both during his lifetime and immediately afterward, other authors made use of Lovecraft’s ideas and creations in their own stories and novels. Lovecraft’s generosity with his own creations ultimately gave them a longevity that other, better writers’ ideas and characters did not have.

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Warning: these Person of Interest thoughts are unlikely to be new, though they’re new to me!

( I have opinions.Collapse )

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Via giandujakiss, the AO3 is one of Time's top 50 websites of 2013.

Also: My relationship to Diet Coke, summed up.

An essay on Superman’s dog, in the form of a conversation between the author of an unauthorized bio of Superman and his editor. I may have to buy this book ….

Pretty Little Liars spinoff! (Spoiler for a character who will leave PLL.) The guy who’s been cast reminds me just a little bit of Jensen Ackles, so I guess we can add that to my DVR at least in the first instance.

And some fiction reviews:

( Diane Duane, CJ Cherryh, high school shenanigansCollapse )

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Counteragent’s awesome SPN genderswap fan film, The Other Side, has started!

Other random links:

Kings, Queens, and In-Betweens: a Kickstarter for a documentary about the spectrum of gender performance.

Enjoyable language rant.

Russian priest uses internet memes to fight slash.

Austin Grossman, Professor Incognito Apologizes: the flavor of this short story can be captured by this quote:

There have been a hundred moments when I was on the brink of telling you. I tried to say the words out loud. I knew you were a physics major and all, but I didn’t think you’d be into it—power and wrongdoing—it was too strange. And I admit, a part of me worries that if I told you about it, the secret part of me would disappear.
And it’s too complicated now. If I’d just told you at the very start, maybe you could have understood, but now? After the diggings and archenemies and sea planes . . . If I started now I’d have to explain why I came to I speak Mandarin and what happened to my original eyes. It’s gone a little far.

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( Octavia Butler, Alaya Dawn Johnson, William SleatorCollapse )

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Quick question before school eats me again: my computer died and I'm trying to get good XF casefile recs ... anyone have a good list?

Free pilots on Amazon—all kids’ shows and (apparently vulgar) comedies now, but one of the comedies involves the zombie apocalypse and another is divas against the supernatural, if this is of interest.

Valedictatorian:

Testing is the accounting of the reform movement, and the executives are cooking the books. They’re manipulating the statements so it looks like the venture is turning a profit. Well, actually, it’s got negative cash flow. The gains are phantoms. The enterprise is insolvent. Even by its own standards, reform fails.
The central proposition of so-called education reform is that it endeavors to make schooling more entrepreneurial. Now this is bogus on its face. The most salient fact about entrepreneurialism is that most ventures fail. Is that the proper model for the delivery of a universal service? …
Like most pro-market types, these people are ignorant of the actual workings of capitalism. They see Apple’s glittering headquarters, Google’s quarterly revenue numbers, and they think, Damn! I wish schools could be more like that! Strewn across the historic landscape behind all this success are hundreds of thousands of failed attempts, many of which don’t make it out of their first year. And you want school to look like this? Well, uh, no; we only want school to imitate successful ventures! Well, I want better arms and a bigger dick, but editing every other eighth of an inch out of the measuring tape will not make it so.

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