Just a little (link) love: Groff edition
October 4, 2018
African SFF and Afrofuturism have been here.
Padma Lakshmi understands why women wouldn’t report at the time. Most of us with souls understand.
I love that Angela’s doing Women’s PF Wednesdays.
Teaching your kids about consent. (This last bit really really doesn’t work for JB though: “With parenting, something I heard is that when little kids are melting down—say, lashing out and generally being terrors—it means that they’re yearning for connection. So even if it goes against your instincts, what you can do is kneel down and give them a big hug.” If you want to see how fast a three year old can try and rip off your limbs, I have a model case right here. Hugs before ze is ready is a HUGE NO.)
Queens of Infamy: Catherine de Medici
Are your kids addicted to television? Mine is a bit, obsessively asking me some weeks “is this a tv day?” but surprisingly, it doesn’t (so far) have the effect I was worried about. In a stunning indictment, though, JB told me one day that ze was going to pretend to be me. When I agreed, ze put on fake glasses and said BYE I GOING TO WORK. You don’t know me!
N. K. Jemisin put it perfectly when she said “Golf Digest to the rescue” ain’t peak 2018 but it’s definitely not a sentence I ever expected to type… For Valentino Dixon, a wrong righted
The price of relevance is fluency: “You see, there is no “Twitter mob”, there’s only people. And people shape culture, and culture evolves. But in the past, the powerful could keep themselves isolated from the way culture evolves, if they wanted to. Janet Jackson didn’t even know what Hot Cheetos are!“
Ugh, I feel so ambivalent about child TV and electronic use.
On the one hand, I watched a ton of TV as a kid (and watch quite a bit nowadays), and I don’t feel my creativity was hampered because of it. I thoroughly enjoy excellent TV and cinema, much in the way I enjoy a classic novel. I learned social mores from sitcoms, a useful way for an awkward introvert like me how to human. Embarrassingly enough, Disney was probably my moral compass back then, which was probably a step up from my other local, meatspace options.
On the other hand, I can definitely feel viscerally the attention-sink electronic use can be. And I worry greatly about the effect of giving my kids unfettered access to content today (from what I have seen Little Sis watch, the quality isn’t all there).
Oh well, kids these days…
Hey, if Disney taught you something about right and wrong, there’s no need to be embarrassed about that. I think the embarrassing thing is people who managed to resist building ANY moral compass despite the many opportunities to do so.
We monitor quality and we engage with JB to make sure that ze knows that not everything ze watches is ok, that we interrogate the actions of the characters in light of our knowledge and don’t just accept everything as ok. (I know I did!)
It’s a learning opportunity!
PSA for your US readers: It is vitally important to call today (or fax or resistbot etc.) to say no to Kavanaugh and the secret sham FBI investigation that they’re not allowing the public to see. The plan is to confirm him by this Saturday. We need to let all senators know that is not ok.
Thank you, I’ve faxed and shared