KJ

The NPR list of the top 100 YA Novels, as chosen by reader nomination and vote, is out.

Remember I complained a little while back about the inclusion of YA novel nominees that were also on NPR's 100 best Sci Fi/Fantasy novels of all time, when the SF/F list was supposed to exclude YA as a category -- an exclusion that kept a lot of popular female authors from being represented?

Here are the novels that are on both top 100 lists. Guess what they all have in common. Just. Guess.

Lord of the Rings Trilogy by J.R.R. Tolkein
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Series by Douglas Adams
The Princess Bride by William Goldman
Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
Dune by Frank Herbert (just the first book on the YA list, the series as a whole on the SF/F list)
Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury
The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle

This is where I should write up some commentary about this amazing coincidence, but right now I'm just too angry to be coherent. Nice work, NPR quiz editors.

Why? Why why why why? Why take away the ONE THING that made you better than other community sites?

I. Don't. Get. It.

Edit: And you know the really SHITTY thing? They only made the announcement on a Russian language community, a couple of weeks ago. The latest news post, from 12/14, makes mention of "changes to comments coming soon!" with no details. It's like they knew they were going to have to sneak it by the user base. Feh.

The change: taking away subject lines from comments. Which is vital for users like fic memes. It makes them impossible to read or track. Disaster for fandom, and you all know I don't use that word lightly.

Son of edit: Looking to leave feedback? This seems to be the best place.

Google is taking all the sharing features out of Google Reader. (Official announcement from Google is here.) No more following other users, sharing and commenting on links, group link blogs, etc. The idea, I guess, is that Reader will become a simple RSS aggregator, and you'll do all your link sharing on Google+

Because we've all moved in to Google+ like good little minons, haven't we?

This, my friends, is a potential disaster.(1) Google Reader is probably the centerpiece of my online life. I depend on other people finding the good stuff on blogs that aren't quite what I would normally follow but still have awesome content. It's my curated Internet, and I will miss that, terribly.

I also have to wonder whether this is a sign that Google is planning to shut Reader down entirely at some point, and that would take us from potential disaster to an actual one. I use Reader for everything. I follow blogs for work, blogs for politics, blogs for fun. I use it to follow high-volume celebrity Twitters like ebertchicago and neilhimself. I use it to follow high-volume cute animal Tumblrs like herekittykittykitty. I literally do not know what I would do without it.

What are we up to, now -- three major Internet service redesign fails in the last month? Facebook, Delicious, now this. Not to mention all the other shenanigans Google has pulled on us lately. To quote Sarah Perez at TechCrunch:

You can’t force me into using Google+ by stealing pieces of Google Reader. That’s not how that’s going to work.

So, how is it going to work? Interesting question, at least for me. My online presence has gotten quite fractured over the last few years. It wasn't all that long ago that all of my publicly visible online social activity -- writing, conversation, link-sharing, on every topic I cared about -- was centered in a single place: my LiveJournal. But as my community has spread, changed, migrated, grown in some areas and shrunk in others, I've been adding more and more services to my plate: Facebook, Twitter, Dreamwidth, Google Reader's sharing features, Tumblr. Maybe it's time for me to rethink that, consolidate back down again, or at least come up with some coherent plan for what content I'm going to share where. One thing to consider: if I have to decouple sharing content from RSS feeds anyway, there's certainly nothing tying me to Google Reader. My options could open up considerably.

Maybe that's just as well. Over the last few years, I've been getting nervous about just how deeply my online life depends on Google, its products, and its services. Perhaps this is another sign that I shouldn't be storing so much content in the Google basket. I recently saw (via, what else, a link on Google Reader) a really thoughtful article about Google by Daniel Soar in the London Review of Books, entitled, somewhat ominously, "It Knows". His thesis is that everything Google does, no matter how far afield from search it might seem, comes back to their core value of improving search, either by giving them more data, more content, or by strengthening the tools used to retrieve that content. I tried to find a pull quote, but there was too much; I highly recommend reading the whole thing.

Soar is not particularly alarmist in his conclusions, at least not in terms of the misuse of personal information, and to be fair that's not what concern me. What does cause me concern is the suggestion that Google sees its user base not as individual customers, but as its beta testers. Its content aggregators. And suddenly, some of their stranger decisions over the years start making a bit more sense.

I'm not about to give up on Google entirely, of course -- it's made itself far too useful. And that's the rub, isn't it? Even when we're angry, they've made it extremely difficult for us to walk away. And that's what worries me, as much as anything.

1. Although not the disaster it would have been a few days ago, before Google announced that they're working on a policy that will allow pseudonyms. Finally.

I mean, seriously. What the hell? Was there any kind of warning on this? Any secret "preview our new service!" opportunity? Because if not.... wow.

Guess it's time to leave. You all know I am generally for riding out the changes with free Internet services, but not when they totally break them overnight. Any recommendations for other bookmarking tools? For my purposes, the only real problem is not being able to see all my tags, but what a problem to have. How is a bookmarking service useful if I can only get to a handful of randomly-selected tags?

Bleh.

Is anyone else having weird problems with LJ? I can get in on my phone, but my computer is only loading blank pages. This has been happening since last night.

I will also be *very* curious to see whether this cross-posts effectively. ETA: Well, the cross-post link appears, anyway. Not that I can open the entry to check.

And here I was, hoping that I would never have to defend Twilight again, but noooooo, Hollywood had to go and ruin everything.

So the last time I discussed this media franchise, last fall, the fanboys of the world had united in their fear and loathing of Twilight because New Moon broke a box office record that had been held by The Dark Knight, and also because the screaming Robert Pattinson fans had "ruined" Comic Con earlier that summer. Still, the strength of New Moon's box office performance had some people speculating that maybe the studios would finally realize that women actually spend money on movies (note the second paragraph).

Yeah, so much for that.

Authors [of a new scholarly book on Twilight] argue shifting of marketing strategies with Eclipse indicates Hollywood devalues female fans :

Despite the record-breaking success of the first two Twilight films, Summit Entertainment shifts marketing strategies with its third film to attract a male audience, MU researchers said. With the latest Twilight film, the researchers observe that the marketing of Eclipse highlights a subplot of Stephenie Meyer’s book that is dark and violent, a ploy to draw male moviegoers. The official full-length trailer for Eclipse promotes the film largely as an action movie instead of focusing on the love triangle that is established in the third book of the Twilight series.

"Although the establishment of a love triangle in Eclipse is central to the story and marks a very important turning point in the series, the movie trailer highlights the action, rather than the romantic, elements of the story," Aubrey said. "Why is Summit doing this? From a cultural point of view, the media industry doesn’t confer cultural legitimacy on texts until they are embraced by men, not just women."

Because it's not enough that women will see this movie in droves and will spend millions and millions of their dollars on the film and the books and the tie-in merchandise. That's girl money, so it doesn't count. No, Hollywood can't possibly consider a franchise successful unless they can get the men to approve of it. Is this because, as a culture, we tend to value men and traditionally male interests more than women and traditionally female interests? Or is because men are the holy grail target demographic for advertisers? (Then again, we might ask why men are the holy grail demographic in the first place.)

I watched the trailer, and the above analysis is no exaggeration. Except for one brief moment where Jacob and Edward are staring each other down, you would never guess that there was a love triangle, or even a romance. Bella gets maybe 15 seconds of screen time; the focus is on the vampires and a little bit on Jacob. Full disclosure: I haven't actually read the book (I stopped after the first in the series), but from what I recall from reading synopses and talking to friends, the epic romance is the primary focus of the story, and the vampire army business is thrown in to raise the stakes at the end. (If I am wrong about this, I am happy to be corrected; let me know.) The film trailer would have it appear to be the other way around. So, here's the big question: is this just about the marketing, or did they actually change the movie to make it potentially more appealing to male audiences? Because that's where I would move from irritated to outright angry.

Hat tip to Comic Worth Reading; especially check out the comments, because the post's author pwns some mansplainers in a way that is really worth seeing.

New quarter + upcoming travel = one busy KJ.

It all kicked off this week, with a messy mix of switching around shifts, working short days and long days, meetings galore, cumulating in a full day of work today. I'm not sure why it's been so exhausting, but I'm really fried -- I could barely keep my eyes open at my desk. Tomorrow I get my one-day weekend, the centerpiece of which will likely be an afternoon of laundry.

Then I work three days, during which time I have a half-dozen projects to wrap up. Thursday morning I leave for Boston, where I'll spend the weekend attending a librarian conference. Monday I hook up with amybang, we spend a couple of days hanging out, and then it's back home on Wednesday, where I immediately head back to three days of work, including another full shift on a Saturday, two weeks from today.

So basically I lose three weekends in a row: two to working on Saturdays, and the one in the middle to the conference, which, while not exactly "work", isn't exactly "not work" either. I'm not complaining, exactly, but it'll be hectic. And if you wonder why I'm not around as much in the next little while, now you know why. I might have to steal myself another three-day weekend sometime next month.

We learned today (through research, fortunately, not the hard way) that meat thermometers are not allowed in the passenger compartment of an airplane. If you want to travel with a probe thermometer, put it in your checked bag.

Because of course a meat thermometer is a deadly weapon. Just like that bottle of water they made you throw away. Unlike, say, a ballpoint pen, or knitting needles. (Help, someone stop me, I'm applying logic to airline security procedures!)

So yes, we are in fact packing for San Diego. Flight is late tomorrow morning; we return on Sunday afternoon. The cooking implements are for the big Christmas dinner that we're helping to make on Saturday -- it's our first time cooking for the whole clan without T's dad to direct traffic, so wish us luck. I'm not bringing my laptop, but I will have my iPhone. This is the first time I've traveled with the phone, and I'm interested to see how well I can use it to stay in touch. I have no idea what reception is going to be like at my mother-in-law's place, though, so if I disappear for a few days, that's why. Wish me luck. All around.

Or any other electronic book reader, as long as the issues of DRM and right of first sale and all the other copyright/ownership issues relating to ebooks are this unsettled:

Amazon deletes bought-and-paid for books from Kindles.

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

If I buy a book, I want to know that I own it. Bad enough that I can't sell or lend an ebook, under most terms of use; I can't even be sure that I'll be allowed to keep it? Again from the article:

...it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.

By the way, you'll never guess who the author was: George Orwell. Of course. Life imitating art yet again.

Uhhh...

Well, I haven't actually updated my spreadsheet since March 10th. I've written since then, but not much. This has mostly been an editing month. Which is fine, I guess, but not what I wanted to report in this space. No fancy graph, either. Can't win 'em all, I guess. In part, I think losing four writing days to my Seattle trip threw me off my stride, but that's no excuse for not getting back to it.

Days written: I'm going to guess about half.
Words written: Around 4k
Stories worked on: 3
Stories posted: 1 -- the P/N microfic project with Nay
Total words for the year: About 23,000
Stories posted for the year: 10

Specific goals:

1. Write or do some substantial editing every day of the month, Thursdays and my time in Seattle excepted. (No free pass for Mondays -- chorus is off this month.) Yeah. Not so much.

2. Finish and post the FF in Space story. I did clean up the first draft and send it to beta. But I meant to have that finished before I left for Seattle, and I actually finished it... last Tuesday. Oops. Maybe this will emerge in April.

3. Make substantial progress on Aftermath. Not even a thousand words, unfortunately, but I did get some good ideas about how to carry forward, I think.

4. Write at least one story for ff_fortnightly. Totally skipped this one, too. Clearly, months where I'm off my writing game are not the time to commit to new projects.

So, where does this leave me for April, a month that will include two trips and the start of a new quarter? I think the number of goals is about right, but I should focus on fewer things. So, let's try this on for size:

1. Write or do substantial editing at least five days a week. (Which allows Monday and Thursday to be free days, if those are the days I most need off, but gives me more flexibility.) And get back in the habit of keeping track of days and wordcount!

2. Work on Aftermath, with a goal of completing a first draft of the chapter.

3. Work on (and ideally finish and post) Auron story for "fic exchange" with muggy_mountain, which is several months overdue at this point.

4. Complete overdue beta project. (That's fair to include as a writing goal, right?)