I'm not really that bothered by spoilers, generally. They don't really ruin anything for me, they just change the experience. It's kind of interesting to watch things happen with a little knowledge of how things will turn out. It's like a weird hybrid of watching something for the first time and re-watching it ( Read more... )

matociquala wrote this essay about problems with the concept of the "strong female character" awhile ago. It listed various problematic traits, and my first reaction as I read the was, "oh crap, I'm a strong female character, aren't I ( Read more... )

There's this trend to use the word "survivor" in the place of "victim", to make the people being referred to feel more empowered. It's most widely used when talking about sexual and domestic violence, but you see it used anytime there is discussion of people who have undergone some sort of extremely bad experience, be it violence, disaster or ( Read more... )

Awhile before Christmas, my mother-in-law asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I told her there were some things on my Amazon wishlist. She said, "But it's all books!" I told her that was because books were one of my favorite things in the world, and she said that that made sense then, and that she used to get people books for Christmas but had ( Read more... )

I think some dreams I have are really not like other people's dreams. I just woke up from a dream that consisted of me reading a mass of comments on a livejournal post I had previously written. The people commenting were all dream characters, not actual people I know on LJ. In the dream, though, I knew some of them, while others had just found the ( Read more... )

I've seen been seeing various links turn up in my social media feeds to essays written (generally) by men, trying to explain #YesAllWomen to other men. I've been noticing a theme to some of them, which I would boil down to this concept ( Read more... )

At one point at this year's Minicon, on a panel about the best science fiction of the previous year, one of the panelists recommended a book in a way that really bothered me: "It's military science fiction - written by a girl!" I think the guy thought he was being funny, but there are a few things wrong with what he said ( Read more... )

Something I realized a long time ago is that I find it much easier to dance a dance routine that I choreographed myself than one someone else has choreographed, even if they are otherwise equal in challenge and quality. Because my own choreography feels right to me and makes sense to me in my mind in ways that someone else's doesn't, even if it is ( Read more... )

I caught up on lj-friendslist-reading this weekend, which I was a couple months behind on. Then tonight phoenixredux and I watched a DVD of the film adaptation of The Time Traveller's Wife, a book we'd both read. The movie was not as good as the book, and had a lot of interesting bits cut out of it, but it did get me thinking new thoughts, some of which I hadn ( Read more... )

Someone posted this article to Facebook:
http://loveisinfinite.wordpress.com/2013/12/27/five-romantic-ideas-that-are-really-not/
. . . and I thought to myself, "It's easy to come up with healthy-relationship-alternate phrases for some of these":

Turn “I can’t live without you.” into something like "You make me happy to be alive" to remove the ( Read more... )