On Billy’s blog: on the dangers of sympathetic magic when choosing one’s national animal. This made me laugh and laugh and laugh.
“Sexism”, the 1971 board game.
Mark Hamill appears to relish opportunities to sign old Star Wars trading cards.
Film Noir: explained via infographic. (“explained”)
The challenges of using itunes for classical music. (Really this is an article about metadata.)
Interview with the writer of legendary 80s horror flick Fright Night
Via Pearce, a troubling overview of research showing how men react to women in the workplace. As a bonus, the url is golden.
Via Peaseblossom: a girl’s guide to gaming. (Really nicely done, this.)
Reflections on Peanuts: Charlie Brown & Snoopy needed each other.
Psychologists highlight a bunch of academic terms that should not be used. There’s some good’uns here. Well worth a look.
Via Robert, a great story of massive, complicated, self-organising co-operation. By slashfic writers, of course.
Via Lisa B, whose new novel is now available at a bookstore near you: How to think about Islamic State.
And finally, via Pearce: Jerrys, and Etsy, and via Billy, Shia and Shias
“Via Robert, a great story of massive, complicated, self-organising co-operation.”
That’s pretty consistent with my experience of fanfic writers. There’s a really huge end of the year exchange called Yuletide where the admins provide the basic rules and setup, and then this huge upswell of people volunteering to do tedious tasks arises to do things like organise people’s Dear Writer letters or write tutorials or run ancillary gift exchanges or have sub-exchanges (like focusing on porn, or persons of colour, or female characters or whatever.) There’s also Yuletide Coal, which is an anonymous LJ account for people to complain in the comments when something wasn’t going their way (there’s a lot of social pressure to be ‘nice’ on the main threads and people like to vent, like), although my sister complained last year that it was annoyingly supportive and upbeat and hardly any self-entitled whining at all.
The mighty Charles Petzold has written eloquently of how badly classical music is served by pop-centric metadata and delivery services. Some choice articles: http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2015/06/Music-Streaming-for-the-Rest-of-Us.html http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2010/05/Classical-Music-Being-Phased-Out.html http://www.charlespetzold.com/blog/2009/07/Classical-Music-and-MP3-Players.html
On the plus side, he has at least found a music service designed around classical music; still a shame that mass media services, unlike outdated second wave bricks and mortar record stores, still can’t be bothered to treat this market properly.