And yet Philip K. Dick’s mental illness didn’t make him a racist who worked out his fears about miscegenation by writing stories about aliens impregnating human women, it made him a perpetual seeker who wrote stories about trying to see past the limits of perception to see the wondrous in everything.

That would be one of the ones that isn’t reissued anymore, to be sure. If you were to read one story, read The Color Out of Space. That is one of the best, most famous, and least racist. He is somewhat important, in that many of his concepts have become part of the horror/sci-fi canon, and have been endlessly reworked…

The owner of the Lovecraft bar, who is leaving town due to multiple accusations of sexual harassment and white supremacy, released a statement about while Lovecraft in his youth was racist, as were most people at the time, yadda yadda, we just like the monsters and the mythology, etc. Total dismissal. Other fans, as…

Your username just made me laugh, because I just transcribed a long lecture about Foucault that spared me the necessity of reading him to understand what a couple of my friends go on about from time to time.

I’m so fucking glad I looked at my notifications on Christmas morning while waiting for my roommate to get out of the bathroom.

I’m not so sure about that. I read Lovecraft, I think, “this guy is racist as fuck.” I read Orson Scott Card, I think “how is it a guy that can empathize with insectoid aliens who slaughtered humans be so fucking intolerant?”

My first and still smartest cat, Miles, started using the toilet on his own. He even batted at the toilet paper and the handle. I taught the others that I had in college to do it, with his help. Later, whenever guests headed up the stairs to the bathroom, Pixel would race up ahead of them so he could show off, because…

Oh, he’ll leave the magnets up for weeks at a time while he brings me other things. Then it’s like he remembers they’re there and brings them to me a few times, and then moves on to something else. Right now it’s the clicker I use to train them. He’s like, “hey, when she clicks this thing, we get treats. So maybe if I…

If you actually do get a cat, please do it and yourself a favor and get this too.  http://www.powells.com/book/think-like-a-cat-how-to-raise-a-well-adjusted-cat-not-a-sour-puss-9780140288544/7-8

Oh for god’s sake: https://www.wired.com/2013/04/spoiler-culture-game-thrones/

Also especially ridiculous is that even though this article is about white people’s reflexive need to excuse racism, and even though Lovecraft’s correspondence and journals make it clear that he was processing his xenophobia by writing stories about our world being invaded by unspeakable horrors, the same commenter…

Sigh, Jez banished me back to the greys long before Gawker died and I spent a year doing better things with my time than reading and commenting on aggregator blogs, before I started slinking back out of sheer self-destructiveness. My habit of rewriting the science posts in the comments did not endear me, nor did my…

And once again, I glance at the comments about a post about a sport I don’t actually care about, and am rewarded with a laugh that warms the cockles of my bitter, humorless, feminist heart. ; )

It’s the same with gender. If women speak more than about 25%-30% of the words in a conversation, or make up more than about 25%-30% of the members of a group, they are perceived as dominating it. This effect has been reliably replicated in a variety of experiments with both male and female observers, although the…

That you keep using his paranoid and fearful view of the world as a reason why it’s not all about racism makes no sense, because it was immigration and black enfranchisement that made him fearful and paranoid. He wrote endless stories about our world being threatened by unspeakable evil as a way of processing what he…

Wait, are people saying “hoards” of people? I haven’t seen that.

Also, I would point out that as you said, context is important when evaluating a work. Therefore it is important to remember that Lovecraft’s paranoia and fear of the world around him was a largely a product of the failure of Reconstruction and the rise of the KKK to combat what was seen as a violation of the natural…

Goddamn right. And it’s rein in and bated breath, goddammit!

I have never said that Lovecraft should not be read, and in fact have said that it is important to keep reading racist literature just as it is important to keep reading history. But it is even more important to not just defend the author’s racism as a mere artifact of the past or irrelevant to the work, especially…

Actually, he did shoot a version like that, and decided against it.