Author Archives: Cynthia

Guest post on Body Impolitic

I was asked to write a guest post on Body Impolitic regarding the troll attacks at WisCon 32.

New feminist sf/fantasy community open

There’s a new livejournal community called femsfaward open to discuss works of sf/fantasy written by women. Go forth and blog.

There are saints among us.

I said goodbye to one last night.  No, she didn’t get the official designation from the Vatican, but Sister John Marie Samaha of the Sisters of the Holy Family was the closest thing I’ve seen to one to date. And, if there’s any such thing as a Catholic version of a bodhisattva, she’d probably fit [...]

Crumbling infrastructure

First the exploding steam pipe in New York City, now a problem with electrical power in San Francisco that caused a transformer to explode under Mission Street. This latest power outage has taken out many websites, including LiveJournal.
Our urban infrastructure is crumbling around us, and nobody wants to pay for it. I’m also [...]

Sigh.

Melissa over at Shakesville posted an entry yesterday about a Brazilian yogurt ad that featured three larger women in sexy poses from movies (one was the famous Marilyn Monroe pose) but communicated the message that these women will never meet men’s preferences unless they eat that yogurt and get rid of that weight. Yes, [...]

Call for submissions

Naamen of Words From The Center, Words From The Edge will be hosting the 13th Feminist SF Carnival on her his new blog and is looking for submissions. Go forth and give her him plenty of stuff to post about!

The latest fannish hoo-ha

Just my US$0.02:
I figure anybody who tapes bacon to his cat as a work avoidance tactic and lives to blog about it has fannish nature. Let the Nippon2007 voters decide about the latest manifestation of fanwriting.

Make the harassers own their misbehavior!

I’ve been thinking about the extreme harassment Kathy Sierra has gotten ever since Liz Henry brought it to my attention. It’s been burning up electrons on one of my mailing lists, and it’s made the technology blog of sfgate.com.
My response to trolls in the past was honed in the Usenet days; it was best [...]

Additional food for thought churning in my head

1) Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s musings on the root causes of our current economic and political problems. It’s a really good comment in a larger discussion, certainly worthy of exploration in more detail.
2) The current problems in the home lending industry coupled with insanely obscene housing prices in the SF Bay Area. I have [...]

A feminist sf/fantasy reader/fan’s dilemma

I was going through the WisCon 31 programming site a few weeks ago, and didn’t find any panels that made me jump up and down and yell, I *must* be on that panel! I found panels I’d like to attend, but none that called out to me. This is not a slam at [...]