It’s the last Wednesday in June and we’re inching ever closer to the Dog Days of Summer. Yuck! We hope you’re all having a great week and are looking forward to some awesome weekend plans.
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The Book Club Chat is tonight at 8:00pm EDT! Because I’m a procrastinator, I started Radiance last night and almost pulled a Bad Decisions Book Club. I’m really enjoying it and I can’t wait to talk about it with everyone!
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Thanks to Reader Christy for sending us this link to her father’s artwork:
I was recently introduced to your work while building a website to showcase the romance novel covers my dad illustrated for Harlequin in the 70s – 80s – 90s. It’s a little sliver of Harlequin history, from the illustration point of view. I’m not an expert, but I had a front seat view.
Be sure to check out the page explaining the process of making a cover for Harlequin!
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Love movies? What about book-to-film adaptations? Well, Parchment Girl has compiled a list of adaptations coming out between July and December of this year! I think I’m most excited about Valerian, mainly because it’s being directed by Luc Besson who did The Fifth Element, probably my favorite movie ever.
Which movies are you excited to see?
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Sarah found this link about a Wikipedia editor fighting online abuse:
Across the internet, trolls disproportionately target women and members of other underrepresented groups. On Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, Wikipedia, and other open platforms, victims of harassment are forced to make a difficult choice — go silent and preserve their mental health, or try to ignore the abuse and continue expressing themselves openly online. As the wounds deepen, that latter choice becomes harder and harder to justify.
When people get forced off the web, their voices disappear from the internet’s public squares. The ideas and memes that dominate skew even further toward a white male perspective. The web becomes less interesting, less representative, less valuable. We all lose.
But on that Friday night, Temple-Wood had an idea. For every harassing email, death threat, or request for nude photos that she received, she resolved to create a Wikipedia biography on a notable woman scientist who was previously unknown to the free online encyclopedia. She thought of it as a giant “fuck you” to the anonymous idiots seeking to silence her.
She said, “I read this and love what she is doing so so much. But I read all the quotes and kept looking for some indication that she had backup. She sounds so alone.”
Battery chargers!
Every few months a bigger, better, and lighter weight battery charger comes out. At this point I have 3 in various sizes—lipstick sized, 6.5oz, and the 12.5oz, which lives in our travel bag. I can recharge my kids' DS, tablets, my phone, etc, before it runs out of charge. - SW
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Buzzfeed put together a pretty funny quiz to see whether or not you’d survive the Victorian era. I laughed out loud at times and my choices granted me survival. Hooray!
If you take it, let me know if you made it out alive!
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Don’t forget to share what super cool things you’ve seen, read, or listened to this week! And if you have anything you think we’d like to post on a future Wednesday Links, send it my way!
Per the Buzzfeed quiz:
You got: Yes!
You had quite the rags-to-riches story during your time as a Victorian. Though you started as a poor, Dickensian street urchin, a series of impossibly lucky encounters transported you into the height of fancy society. Well done!
Social-climbing courtesan that I am…
Per the quiz – I also got the same result as Ren Benton – must be a social climbing courtesan too!
Same. I chose the dodo as my bff.
I got a YES on the Buzz Feed quiz. It said I had quite the rags to riches story — “from street urchin to fame and fortune!” LOL!
I’m sensing a theme here. If I ever have to assemble a time-traveling team to commit a heist in England during the mid to late 1800s, I know where to post the ad.
You got: Yes!
You had quite the rags-to-riches story during your time as a Victorian. Though you started as a poor, Dickensian street urchin, a series of impossibly lucky encounters transported you into the height of fancy society. Well done!
P.S. I want the evening gown with the fur collar for reals.
No! Apparently I have too few doilies and dead relative’s hair, and spent too much time gazing at women’s ankles!
I loved reading about the Harlequin cover process! I actually discovered a ton of 60s-70s era Mills & Boons at my local Savers last weekend and bought one *just* for the goofy cover.
Oh gosh, and just noticed one of the cover process examples is by Gloria Bevan, author of my goofy cover!
That Wikipedia editor’s idea sounds great, but… exhausting, if she gets a lot of abuse. I worry that she won’t be able to sustain it long, but I admire her for trying.
I feel like one thing we really need to do is make abusive ideologies – like the MRA/PUA/manosphere subculture – socially unacceptable. We need to pressure major sites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube to live up to their terms of service prohibiting hate speech and actually ban abusive users and ones who spread hate ideologies. We need to pressure Web hosting companies like Squarespace and Cloudflare that allow hate sites to change their policies (and then enforce them). We need to pressure events like conventions to bar attendees who run hate accounts. No one is owed a platform and an audience.
Last night I wrote a lengthy e-mail to the people who run VidCon explaining, with examples and links, that MRAs are a terrorist subculture, not a legitimate ideology, and that members of YouTube’s antifeminist community should be banned from future cons. I also reported a Twitter user who contacted me whose feed seemed to consist almost entirely of transphobic abuse. I urge others to report hate accounts and put pressure on site owners and conventions to ban abusers and proponents of hate ideologies.
“MRAs are a terrorist subculture, not a legitimate ideology”
Althea, that’s a brilliantly succinct way of describing it. Well done.