I got cornered in the YA section of a library once, and it was outright surreal in a terrifying way. I was like 23, studying to be a YA librarian which is why I was hanging out reading there during the day in the first place, and this guy comes up to me and assesses from… IDK, my cheap black boots and secondhand…

You do realize, right, that Hillary championed an attempt at socialized medicine twenty years ago, and its resounding failure is probably still her most dramatic defeat? She called it a fantasy because she tried that and it crashed and burned horribly, not because she doesn't believe it would be a good thing. It's…

I don't know, I love pulp, but Tarzan is actually from the teens and is grotesquely, massively racist in a way that's really hard if not impossible to excise from the narrative, to the point where when Disney tried, they did it by leaving out Black characters entirely in a story set in Africa. That doesn't make me…

Oh, definitely. I just wanted to emphasize that one of the things that did not get No Awarded Saturday night was an expose of someone who was a visible fixture of liberal SFF fandom for years.

The Puppies' insistence that this is all a liberal conspiracy also fails to account for the victory of Laura J. Mixon for Best Fan Writer. Mixon won for her expose on Winterfox/Requires Hate/Benjanun Sriduangkaew (all aliases), a progressive/social justice-focused (and lesbian Thai) reviewer and author who was…

He has that one essay in his Related Works nomination where he seems
to be proposing that fucking a gorilla is less morally objectionable
than consensual gay sex, as long as the gorilla's owner says it's okay.
It's pretty amazing.

This year's winner is idea-driven hard SF, with the same kind of paper-thin characters endemic to the genre. It was also some of the best hard SF in years. The Puppies inexplicably overlooked it on their slates (probably because it's a Chinese novel in translation that begins by focusing on a female character),…

The thing is, when I look at, say, the Best Novel nominations, of the non-Puppy nominees, one was Mil-SF (Ancillary Sword), one was idea-driven hard SF (The Three-Body Problem, which won), and one was a relatively optimistic political fantasy (The Goblin Emperor). Two of the three represent the kind of SF the Puppies…

"Brain! Brain! What is brain?" Said whenever I have a moment of pure stupidity or mental lapse. I picked it up from my parents, because I come by my fandom honestly.

Yes, a MALE idea of what sex appeal looks like. Seriously.

Just for the record, if a contemporary aggregate group of fanfic-writing women isn't good evidence, speculation about your grandma is even less so.

David McCallum was also by far the prettier of the two, and the more popular character, even among adult women. There's an entire generation of fanfic where Solo is virtually ignored in favor of Ilya, dating from the days when fandom took place entirely in zines and the participants were nearly all adult women.

If you say so. Although I'll note that Valentino was definitely a pretty, pretty dude even by modern standards, and extremely young to boot, as was Hayakawa at the time he was a heart throb. We're talking attractive, fine featured men in their 20s rather than the more rugged looks of Connery, who was also in his 30s…

Or maybe in the 60s the casting was about men looking for actors who embodied what their own idea of masculinity rather than what the majority of women find desirable, and now we have casting that actually takes the female viewership's tastes into account. That's at least as plausible as your reasoning.

The original show has had a fandom for the last 50 years or so, with slash fic for the last 30 at least, so as long as it's as homoerotic as the show, we can assume it'll spark something.

That's a good comparison, and yeah, I agree. I don't mind the silly very much, as long as it's not too blatantly illogical and I can recognize the characters, but it clearly bugs a lot of people very badly.

I honestly think the Sherlock Holmes movies were overall unfairly maligned, especially the first one. The plots were no stupider than a phosphorescent dog or a trained snake, but because they were playing up the pulp aspects of the stories instead of the cerebral aspects, the way every other adaptation has, they're…

From what I've heard, the original plan was to have Oz captured by the Initiative instead of Spike, and for Adam to be a two-part villain in the middle of the series, with Maggie Walsh as the real big bad. My understanding is the plans were scuppered by both actors' decisions to leave the show, so they had to retool…

Oh, I'm sure he does, but the thing is, responsible kink is pretty much supposed to be an illusion of danger, with as little of the real thing as is viable given the activities involved. Most of D/s, especially, is role-play, like an elaborate game of let's pretend that everyone makes themselves buy into the idea that…

The thing that's getting me is his use of BDSM as apparently synonymous with S&M. Dude has one big old bondage kink and the dehumanization thing is a subset of dominance & submission. He is definitely into BDSM as most people understand it. He just doesn't like pain, which isn't even particularly uncommon for people…