Wow, usually war criminal leaders do the “failed artist” thing first.

I should add, people are trying to excuse GRRM for saying it’s a lot of names to remember and oh no, how difficult it would be to memorize those foreign sounding names? But the man has literally written over a thousand characters for ASOIAF alone, has managed to memorize hundreds of them, including their family…

Sad to see that comment you replied to got even one like. It’s wild how easy it is for others to excuse racism.

You wrote a whole hell of a lot of words without thinking even for a second. The awards ceremony isn’t the wide world of everything. You aren’t walking along, minding your own business, and then handed a random envelope. Martin was the host. The nominees were published months ago. One of the jobs as a host is to…

It’s pretty sad to see io9 comments be negative and pushback on this. The comments before were pretty inclusive but it’s clear the scifi/fantasy space is still dominated by white men even now as people have tried to be more inclusive. Even those mocking the term micro-aggression here are showing their asses.

is this really the year we choose to posthumously honor HP Lovecraft? reaaaaaaaaaaaaaally? I mean the US is racist as shit every year, but still.

I think the larger point all of these discussions seem to be missing is that a mispronounced name wouldn’t feel like a secret message saying “you don’t belong” if people in these situations weren’t constantly bombarded with other secret and not-so-secret messages saying the same thing. If the kids in your classroom…

And that is why teachers like you and your wife are the ones I’ve remembered for the rest of my life. Thank you.

I once saw a bit by an Anglo-Nigerian comic talking about she kept on dealing with people who were so confused by her full name that they’d instead offer to call her by something pretty far removed from it. “Do you mind if we call you Tina?” She said nobody in Nigeria would ever try that. “Your name is Bob Smith?…

Can I weigh in with what I hope will be a fairly nuanced response on the issue of mispronounced names and microaggressions?

Not at an awards ceremony. If the task is to announce people’s names to bestow honor, the host should learn or be told how to pronounce all of the names.

Right, no offense to the Hugo Awards, but (for better or worse) Lovecraft’s position in the field of SF is pretty firmly established. I don’t understand what a posthumous Hugo is going to add. Especially in an era where his racist views are impossible to ignore. 

Why the fuck would you give HP Lovecraft a posthumous Hugo award? The tackling of the overt white supremacism by modern authors working within “his universe” (since that wasn’t ever really his explicit intent) is way, way more interesting than the original works themselves.

The National Socialist German Worker’s Party: Fooling ignorant people by putting ‘socialist’ in their name since 1920!

Speaking from experience here... Clever abusers ALWAYS abuse behind closed doors while painting themselves as friendly and loving. Idiotic ones might have their abuse on full display, but it is entirely possible Depp’s staff was unaware of how he was treating her, if true. I don’t think Depp is particularly idiotic.

Here’s my take on Kes. She didn’t start out as the sex object but the writers sexualized her by making her sole character trait “Neelix’s girl.

Serena Williams almost died from childbirth complications and she’s also a wealthy celebrity. Doctors don’t take Black people’s pain seriously because of implicit bias. I am going to link to this recent article, which gives a cursory rundown of the issue, but has a lot of excellent links to the studies and more…

But Denise left, and the two remaining women were in caring professions. So it was ok to be on a spaceship as a woman, but you had to be a nurturer.”

An enumeration of a train wreck can be as long as one has space for. So, towards completionism:

I think what Novak’s pointing out (and I agree) is that there’s a pretty stark contrast of what’s happening in the video versus reality; there’s a bit of a “creep” factor involved with opening The Happiest Place on Earth while over a hundred-thousand people are dead from a virus and we’re deploying National Guard to…