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“Neither Miller nor McQuiston write with the expectation that their stories are consumed entirely for women, but both TSoA and RWRB are extremely popular with women, sometimes more so than with actual gay men.”

…I’m pretty sure the “sometimes” there is, in actual fact, “almost always.” Romance novels about queer men are overwhelmingly written by and consumed by women. It’s kind of charming that this author appears unaware of this.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 4:35 AM on April 10, 2024

I should maybe clarify that I (a queer woman who reads and writes this stuff) didn’t have a negative reaction to this at all, apart from finding it somewhat surprising. I think it’s great that he’s discovered this genre.

Also as a general note: despite some confident declarations in this thread, there is no one single reason women read m/m, and many people get things out of it that are diametrically opposed to what other people get out of it. I’ve had many discussions… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 4:19 PM on April 10, 2024

Anyone, please recommend interesting writing about M/M romance! I would love to read some feminist critique that helped me better understand the books I'm enjoying and what they are saying.

Pornography by Women For Women, With Love is a 1985 essay by lesbian sci-fi writer Joanna Russ about the thriving Kirk/Spock slash community of the time. It's absolutely fascinating.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 11:08 AM on April 11, 2024

This information only makes it more baffling to me that they attributed the obvious photo editing to Kate herself once it was pointed out. Why do that? It’s just such a strange choice, out of all the possible responses.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 10:32 AM on March 23, 2024

It’s such a BAD photoshop, is what gets me. Nefarious reasons or not, can’t they afford a damn professional?
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 8:58 PM on March 11, 2024

Absolutely zero percent of my sudden interest in this whole affair has to do with thinking Kate doesn’t deserve privacy. It’s not about her at all, it’s about the stunningly incoherent palace PR response. It’s about the fact that they didn’t just say “she deserves privacy” and instead have been clearly and blatantly dishonest about her condition to the point where it’s created a massive own-goal. That photo they released is the kind of thing you see in a true crime… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 5:50 AM on March 12, 2024

Everyone is talking about Kate because the British press is misogynist. Charles is dying of cancer that his royal homeopath is not going to cure and yet it's Kate that the media is obsessing and demanding proof of life over. The King, the actual monarch, gets privacy from the press. But his daughter-in-law, someone who is not part of the line of succession, has surgery and needs to recover and it's suddenly a conspiracy.

To me this is not an accurate… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 6:37 AM on March 12, 2024

It's not that it just hasn't occurred to people who have been following this story closely that she probably just doesn't look great after having surgery, they know that. It's everything else about it that seems out of character and strange.

Yes, thank you for saying this! We’re talking about a family whose entire public strategy has been laser-focused on maintaining a certain level of privacy and polished artifice for generations. It’s not some… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 7:37 AM on March 12, 2024

I don’t think it’s necessary to speculate about the expressions in the photo when the photo is clearly manipulated anyway, tbh (and it 100% is, if anyone’s still skeptical about that - I have merely kinda-skilled-amateur photoshop skills and a moment’s glance makes it obvious.)
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 4:19 PM on March 12, 2024

Broadly, I think it’s missing the point to say stuff like “Kate deserves time to rest and recover without being photographed” because that’s not actually what this whole scandal/mystery/whatever is about. It really has nothing to do with Kate as an individual at all. It’s the fact that they are treating whatever’s going on with her as an absolute secret in notable contrast to the way they have handled previous medical events in the royal family. This has made people… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 4:30 PM on March 12, 2024

I wouldn't read too much into bricks. There's plenty of other oddness going on.

Yes, there’s plenty of very obvious evidence that This Is Weird without that and without stuff like “is that a tassel or a heel on the girl’s shoe” or whatever. It’s worth pointing out that the very comprehensive Neiman Lab article came out BEFORE the first photo was sent to the wire services, and it does a very good job of showing why this blew up - it’s because the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 1:40 PM on March 14, 2024

Lol Don Pepino I legitimately can’t tell which parts of that are sarcasm. No shade either way.

In all seriousness, I have been asking myself why I DO care about this, as a person with no history of interest in the royal family or in celebrity gossip in general.

I think there are a lot of factors really. There’s the general atmosphere of resenting the rich and powerful and the way they feel entitled to set a narrative and expect us not to question… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 10:03 AM on March 16, 2024

Absolutely not, because the LONG-term value of stocks is not a thing rich people appear to care about anymore.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 6:31 AM on March 12, 2024

Guess who isn’t experiencing any consequences at all for the incredible proliferation of illegal weed shops? LANDLORDS.

I am a huge supporter of legal weed. But now on my three block walk home from the subway, I see ten weed stores, all unlicensed. One of them used to be the only produce store on my block. And I don’t blame the new store for the fact that the old store vanished - I blame the landlord, who will suffer zero consequences because this city is run by… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 7:17 AM on February 25, 2024

Blendoku 2 is basically the only app game I play, happy to see it has a Good rating!
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 3:03 PM on February 5, 2024

I read most of this article with my jaw hanging open. If these guys are right, then it changes practically everything we thought we knew about biology.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 3:00 PM on January 18, 2024

A little bit of woo goes a long way towards reminding the otherwise-rational not to be myopic, dismissive, and incurious.

Yeah, perhaps I simply framed this post poorly, but when I read an article about a guy who electrically induced an eyeball to grow where no eyeballs ought to grow just by zapping it with electrical signals that matched the signals in eyes… I mean how can anyone not think that’s the coolest shit they ever heard? Or transferring the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 5:26 AM on January 19, 2024

There’s a great tweet I’ve seen circulating recently that’s something like “if you were actually lazy, you’d be having fun.” Damn did I need to hear that…
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 10:08 AM on January 10, 2024

Just as a data point: I was diagnosed based on a one page checklist I filled out myself at my first meeting with a new psych. IT IS NOT ALWAYS HARD, please do not let that stop you from trying!
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 2:06 PM on January 11, 2024

It honestly stuns me that “there are Very Bad Criminals there so OBVIOUSLY Israel has no choice but to indiscriminately bomb it to rubble and kill thousands of children” is an opinion it is even possible to have. I truly cannot find the words to express how horrific I find that opinion to be.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 6:17 AM on December 28, 2023

At this point anyone who says “Gaza/Hamas” with a straight face is someone whose opinion I cannot take seriously. There is no logical endgame to that line of thinking besides the complete extermination of the entire population of Palestine.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 7:09 AM on December 28, 2023

I will never forget the loaded baked potato flavor chips I found at a midwestern truck stop as a kid. Sour cream, bacon, cheddar, green onion. Transcendent. Never did find them again. And then there were the ma la hotpot chips I got in China - I brought back six bags.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 7:22 PM on December 4, 2023

And regardless of whatever weird right wing politics some of these people might be into, I don't see anything wrong with discouraging addiction to pornography and masturbation

Well sure - but where’s the line? Unless your position is that pornography and masturbation are always bad, what’s the criteria for when it becomes an addiction? I’m sure we can all point to clear cases we’d mostly agree on, but this movement is not about placing reasonable… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 2:15 PM on November 12, 2023

I’m not surprised at the possibility that this happened, but I’m very surprised they just came right out and said it. Honestly I tend to assume this sort of thing happens all the time, so my question is, what is it about this time that made Canada willing to actually make an accusation publicly?
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 3:43 PM on September 18, 2023

I've used Goodreads for many years, but only to bookmark and track what I read. The ratings and recs are similarly almost unusable for me, unfortunately.

On Goodreads in particular, I find I get a lot more out of reading the one- and two-star reviews than the positive ones. For example, with sci-fi, if the low-star reviews are full of people calling it “pretentious” and “confusing” there’s a good chance I’ll love it. On the flip side (especially with… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 12:19 AM on September 7, 2023

Crucially though, that doesn’t mean “we don’t believe he’s really dead,” just “we’re waiting for more definitive confirmation.” It’s the same after natural disasters, in the first hours or days the number of people “confirmed dead” always lags enormously behind the number of people who are merely obviously dead.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 2:41 PM on August 23, 2023

Good lord. 54% and I’m lucky to have it, I think…
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 2:30 PM on August 21, 2023

A week after my dad died I tried an online support group for young people who had lost parents. That group was one of the most traumatizing aspects of that entire awful period of my life. I sat there listening to person after person - who were clearly all regulars and clearly knew each other quite well - talk about how they were three years, five years, ten years out from their loss and still feeling so so horrible and I thought, this is my life now, this is my life, I’m permanently broken, my… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 5:16 AM on August 3, 2023

I almost always win Civ 6 with a Science or Diplomacy victory, but a couple of those Diplo victories have been truly Machiavellian. The best/worst was when I played as Australia, which benefits from having war declared on it and from freeing other people’s cities. My continent had a much weaker civ located between me and Rome, so I made a military alliance with the other civ and then repeatedly provoked Rome into war against us both, after which Rome would steamroll my ally and I’d leap to the… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 1:11 PM on July 29, 2023

The comments on the New York Magazine article linked here are really something.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 11:27 AM on July 17, 2023

a person i know who works closely with Congress said that this looks like an intentional distraction By congress from the outside but in truth, all of the fucking congresspeople are legitimately, absurdly, unhingedly obsessed with this UFO shit to the total disregard of everything else. The person I know is ready to tear their every last hair out in complete frustration and disgust.

This is hilariously depressing, or depressingly hilariously, but I definitely buy it.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 12:25 PM on July 17, 2023

Speculation about whether intelligent alien life could possibly visit Earth is basically irrelevant to the question at hand, which is “if aliens DID visit Earth, would they choose to interact with this planet by mysteriously getting up to decades of occasional veiled airborne shenanigans in mostly just one country, producing no concrete evidence that has ever been made public but plenty of concrete evidence that has been incredibly well-concealed by some shadowy branch of… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 4:59 PM on July 17, 2023

Here’s where I fall off the logic train - why assume it’s very specifically aliens causing these inexplicable events as opposed to, say, fairies, or humans from another dimension?
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 5:13 AM on July 20, 2023

My wonderful 11th grade English teacher had The Unbearable Lightness of Being in her curriculum, and it immediately became the favorite book of half the class, including me. I should reread it now that I’m 35 instead of 17; I’m sure I’ll experience it completely differently.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 8:19 AM on July 12, 2023

For example, Space X, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic all rely on experienced inside experts to oversee the daily operations,

…and notably, none of these companies has ever had a catastrophic equipment failure or anything
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 8:49 AM on June 20, 2023

Uhh yeah I assumed literally everyone would take “or anything” as “this is sarcasm.” SpaceX is scattering exploded rocket debris over protected wetlands constantly.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 9:42 AM on June 20, 2023

…and formatting a sentence this way doesn’t imply sarcasm or anything
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 10:41 AM on June 20, 2023

But it is true that even when they sign waivers, people don't really believe in the risk...deep down they think it's just something lawyers make companies do, because if it was that dangerous it wouldn't be allowed at all.

100% this. I work for a park that has an ice rink in the winter, and we make everyone agree to waivers saying they know they could be injured or killed. And it’s true, they could! But it’s not LIKELY - and I can almost guarantee… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 2:31 PM on June 20, 2023

I wonder if the "fix" for going to more than 3000m is their 'dynamic hull monitoring' system. Still I wouldn't go into one of those until they built & destroyed through testing quite a few of them just to be sure they got their analysis right.

At these pressures all subs come with a built-in hull monitoring system, it’s called the hull caving in.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 6:43 PM on June 20, 2023

“Debris is consistent with catastrophic loss of the pressure chamber,” US Coast Guard press conference
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 12:02 PM on June 22, 2023

Someone asking about recovery of bodies… Coast Guard representative says something like “so, this is an incredibly unforgiving environment”…
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 12:07 PM on June 22, 2023

“Implosion in the water column, consistent with location of last communication” though too early to say for sure
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 12:09 PM on June 22, 2023

I got to ride in a Weinermobile once in Chicago because a friend of a friend was one of the drivers, and hand to god, we would not have gotten more attention from people on the street if we’d been in the popemobile. People lost their minds.

This article (which is honestly only like 15% about fucking) did make me wonder whether anyone has been seriously injured doing this job, either in a crash or by a creepy hot dog stalker. If anyone has, I wouldn’t be surprised if… [more]
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 3:52 PM on May 30, 2023

When I first heard the phrase “autofiction” recently, I assumed it was something to do with automatic writing, like, the spiritualist thing. I thought it was all fiction supposedly written by spirits with the author as a medium. The reality is so much more boring.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 3:11 AM on May 22, 2023

How many other nations have multiple champions in an activity that's popular in other parts of the world but which they don't pay much attention to?

US women’s national soccer team?
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 7:07 PM on May 1, 2023

I think it’s important to point out that all the NYT knows about the the texts is what Fox’s lawyers chose to show them. There’s nothing in there confirming that he was fired over those specific texts that lawyers were willing to show a newspaper and not over something far worse.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 9:53 AM on April 29, 2023

I saw a tumblr post about this and I honestly couldn’t tell if it was a real trend or a joke. I’m kinda still not sure.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 4:56 AM on April 24, 2023

I have a friend who loves video games, who as a kid was left alone in open water when the boat he’d been in drove away without him. It returned pretty quickly but ever since, he’s had this phobia and had a huge amount of difficulty with underwater levels. I’m so glad this exists and I’m gonna send him this link immediately!
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 11:51 AM on April 22, 2023

Just chiming in to say I’m so happy to see the Joanna Russ love in this thread. We Who Are About To… is one of my absolute favorite books despite the fact that I’ve barely ever recommended it to anyone (“It’s kinda like an angry lesbian postmodern sci-fi The Stranger” is a pitch that doesn’t draw in many people but the people it does draw in are my very favorite type of people)
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 9:16 AM on April 13, 2023

Honestly, I feel like any list of SF novels is gonna reflect the evolution of the genre way less than a list of short stories. I think that’s somewhat particular to SF.
posted to MetaFilter by showbiz_liz at 3:52 PM on April 14, 2023