Hurricane #Irma chez aztec

As some of you may know, I’m in Florida, in the Greater Orlando area. We were in Hurricane Irma’s forecast path for several days. Fortunately, we were not hit directly.

My house is still standing. Lost some siding, some soffit, and the back porch is a loss, but otherwise, the house is still structurally sound. Yay!

On the other hand, my side yard is impassable, due to tree limbs and other debris that, by the grace of some unknown deity, didn’t hit the house itself. And I have no power, no internet, and no cell phone signal. Yay.

I am one of the lucky ones.

Thank you all who sent good thoughts our way.

So, about that “writing reviews” thing…

As some of you may know, I am a moderator at MyMedia, which started as one of the biggest LOST discussion forums back in September 2004. I cross-post most of my reviews over there, and recently I was asked to write a quick and dirty primer for the movie review subforum.

After a bit of thought, I realized it addresses one of my main pet peeves about reviewing (i.e., what makes for a good review). The post is after the fold, minus the bits that pertain specifically to MyMedia; I also have added a few further thoughts after it.

If you read…

(I originally posted this to MyMedia, where barely anyone at all admits to reading, let alone liking, romance. After a bit of thinking about it, I decided to share it over here too. No need to thank me 🙂 )

If you read romance–and by this, I mean, you have read at least six to ten romance genre books–and if you like it, you will find this both hilarious to the point of tears, and completely accurate.

If you don’t read romance, you may still find it funny and interesting, but you’ll probably miss a lot of the inside jokes.

A bit of a foreword:

This bodes well!

In the midst of panic–the TBR Challenge review is due this Wednesday!–I just managed to laugh out loud.

While reading.

While reading a new-to-me author, to boot.

This truly bodes well.

 

(and I just realized I need to change the image and link on the sidebar–gah)

A few not-so-brief thoughts (EC v DA)

So DA and EC settled. Well. Huh. #notchilled

— Courtney Milan (@courtneymilan) October 22, 2015

So.

That happened.

And #notchilled basically exploded.

For any of my readers who are not aware, erotic romance/erotica publisher Ellora’s Cave filed a defamation suit against the blog Dear Author, and the blog’s founder and owner, Jane Litte aka Jen Frederick.

The basis for the lawsuit is the publication, back in September of 2014, of The Curious Case of Ellora’s Cave. If you have a few days to spare, there are a number of interesting posts written about the case in the intervening thirteen (ye gads!) months. You can find links to quite a few of those at the bottom of this post. (Please note that I have continued to add new links at the end, particularly to Courtney Milan’s and Deirdre Saoirse Moen’s posts explaining some of the legal stuff in layman terms.)

Still here…somewhat.

Holy smokes, it’s been over a month since I so much as spent a few minutes around here, let alone actually posted.

I’m behind on everything, and this is, still, not a full post, more a brief note to catch up.

Also, gratuitous kitten pictures. (Wendy, you were right.)

Interesting times

Many of us have heard the so-called Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times.”

We are, all around the globe, living in interesting times. In the US, even though it’s still almost fourteen full months to election day, the campaigning is already in full force.

Fundamentalism is the word of the day, when you have presidential candidate Mike Huckabee physically present to cheer bigoted asshole Kim Davis, bemoaning the oppression and persecutions of Christians…in an overwhelmingly Christian country, as well as baldly stating that he, too, would break federal law to ‘uphold his Christian convictions’–at the expense of other US citizens’, and fellow human beings’, rights.¹

Incredibly biased corporate media is another word of the day, when you have CNN actually approving the publication of a headline that compares Kim Davis to Rosa Parks. (Cue incoherent sounds of rage here.) Even if the article itself explains why such an assertion is, at the very least, hypocritical, using that as clickbait is…rage inducing.

There is more, so much more, in the wider world, that makes our present interesting.

Then, there’s the personal.