In my history grad program, we had a joke. All papers should be begun with a formal opening invocation, a la correspondence under the Sultans and the Ottoman empire.
"In the name of Foucault, the beneficent, the merciful, who mystifies clarity, and clarifies mystery. To continue..."

If it's a choice between minimum-wage shit jobs, or that data entry job I had ($10/hr! woo hoo) that had me talking myself down every Monday morning, or any of the other soul-eroding ways that I've traded my life for money, and sex work, I'll take sex work. I was just never clear on how to get started, in any coherent fashion.

Perhaps those who claim to be interested in keeping women safe could work to, I dunno, legalize sex work (because most people in the "justice" system are of the opinion that by operating outside of the law, sex workers don't get to enjoy its protections), and maybe promote an intelligent sexual culture which benefits everyone. Or make it so people don't have to choose which basic necessity they can afford this week. Heck, do both. Shoot the moon. (I have so many thoughts about this. Seriously.)

Great post, anyway.

I grew up reading sf/f, raised on Star Trek and Heinlein and Doc Smith, and LeGuin and Brackett and McCaffrey and later McMaster-Bujold, but while my older brother remains active in the community (including voting for those same widely-disputed Hugos), I have avoided both genres for years. The pattern of my aversion (except for Discworld) is so profound as to be a compulsion.

The reason is this: there came a point, after being a critical reader of every other text, when I had to address the ones I'd grown up with, the "genre" fiction which was my intellectual junk food, with the same rigor as I addressed everything else. I had to ask: why, in all this "speculative fiction," has all the speculation gone to technology, war, exploration, and so little to humanity? With all the technological changes and advances, all the shifts in time and place, why is humanity unchanged? Why is human society so stagnant in these visions? These stories gave me parades of strangeness, improvements in every kind of technology, but their human actors and social roles were frozen in place.

The conclusion I reached was this: for the largest part, this is a result of failure of imagination, empathy, or courage. To the straight white guys writing the bulk of the material, there were no problems with the social order, and thus nothing to improve, challenge, or advance. Nothing changes because they don't see anything that needs to change: in a social order perfectly adapted to their comfort, it is the rest of the universe which needs to be changed.

Thankfully, we're forcing them out of their comfort zones here on Earth, and we're getting better reports from beyond the stars.

This may reflect cost differences by geographic area. Around here, I try not to pay $10 for an actual movie ticket (I believe $8.50 is the standard), but Mallory lives in CA, where Everything Costs More.

No reason why the tablet cannot also provide you the imdb entry as well as "save the date" preorder/booking info.

it took me a while (not owning or having access to tv) to figure out why I had an intense hatred for "Supernatural." Until I figured out that the Big Dumb Longhaired One was the Big Dumb Longhaired Awful Boyfriend, at which point my revulsion became the most obvious, natural thing in the world.

Yarnbomb everything. The four-poster bed, the tea set which the nurse leaves infuriatingly close to the edge of the table, the syringe and lavage, the credenza, the small dog who is your primary companion, the infuriating nurse, the calfskin-bound volumes which your father so assiduously collected and never read. Cover everything in intricate and colorful windings of yarn, until it all assumes a jarring, padded sameness, and when they are searching for the tablets the doctors insist on prescribing you, escape through the window.

He’s a sexy shepherd who gets whisked away to Heaven to be God’s bartender: he's a giant eagle going through an identity crisis. Together, they'll change Olympus forever!

This has significantly compromised my ability to even.

I've been thinking a lot about why "Between the World And Me" left a weird feeling at the edge of my brain, and I think this is a huge part of it. If the black body [read as male] is a site of violence, the female body [read as white] is community property: those with both of necessity have an experience that those with only the one lack, and it ought to be heard in order to be understood and redressed.