how did it get to be July?

Jul 11, 2012 08:35

I am looking for people who have experience as nonfiction e-book formatters and cover designers. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Covert Affairs: stepping up the “shit”s now, hunh? Also I approve in general of Annie challenging the CIA’s sexism, though the obvious ironies of fucking for your country are obvious. And of course I approve of pretending to be married, because who doesn’t love that plot?

Slate on an extortion ring preying on gay men in the 1960s. Read until the end. American life is nothing but second acts.

Making money on YouTube: "A history of the entertainment business could be framed as a series of experts asking, 'Who the hell wants to watch that?' When the answer is 'more people than you think,' the definition of profitable entertainment changes."

Meowbify: Add cats to any internet site. I tried it on AO3, which seemed perfectly appropriate.

Kim Newman, Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D'Urbervilles: Newman was doing the pastiche/reboot before Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, etc., and he’s good at it. Basher Moran, a racist, sexist thug, is Moriarty’s right-hand man, and this is his account of some of their more interesting adventures. I liked the War of the Worlds parody best, but I suspect many Sherlock Holmes fans would enjoy the reversals of Watson’s recorded adventures, which of course include references to other unreported cases and internal inconsistencies in the same was that the original Holmes stories do.

Sharon Shinn, Angel-Seeker: It’s been a while since I read a Samaria novel; they’re het wingfic romances set in a world where winged angels can call down intercessions from Jovah (actually a big computer/spaceship, but the average Samarian thinks it’s God). This one deals with the highly repressive and misogynistic trading culture, the Jansai, that doesn’t have much use for the angels’ governance but is important to Samaria’s economy; specificially, the head angel sends the angel Obadiah to negotiate with them, but he also happens to fall in love with Rebekah, a Jansai woman, which is decidedly not supposed to happen. Another plot involves Elizabeth, an angel-seeker who hopes to get pregnant with an angel’s child and thus gain respect and love but slowly learns that she’s worth more than that as a person. The Jansai were basically exotic desert people whose treatment of women made everyone else’s menfolk look better, though Shinn did suggest why it was hard for Rebekah, and the women around her, to reject their culture wholesale-the only option on offer. Elizabeth’s journey made a thematically satisfying contrast (change in the self in a culture that supports that versus change in a culture that tries to crush it), but I think I might be done with romances in a world where everyone apparently has a heterosexual soulmate out there, waiting to be found.


comments on DW | reply there. I have invites or you can use OpenID.

au: newman, reviews, au: shinn, personal, fiction, covert affairs

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