Double header! I may engage in some hyperbole in the following paraphrases, but I've also had like, five cups of coffee. Please bear with me.

First Unfunny: Seth MacFarlane.



Second Unfunny: Onion makes joke that not only falls flat, but takes out several bystanders and kills a kitten on the way down. The premise was, they called nine year old Oscar nominee Quvenzhane Wallis a cunt. The joke was that no one would ever say such a thing about her. Except, in fact, people were saying that shit about her, and say that shit to little nine year old black girls all the time*. Link is Laura Hudson's explanation and commentary on the matter.

The Onion has apologized (that's the tumblr apology, I'm not linking to the facebook one because the comments hurt my soul even more), which moves us to phase 2 of the problem, where there are now people in the comments and elsewhere shaming the Onion for apologizing for insulting a nine year old girl.

Here's one where because his friends are dicks to each other, it's okay to dehumanize a nine year old girl. Other arguments include the assumption that all jokes are sacred, comedians never fuck up, and somehow it's a personal affront when someone else apologizes for hurting someone. Also humour is dead forever because they apologized. No links to those ones, those are in the comments and you can't make me go in there to paste.

You can't.

Speaking of comments, even positive posts about Quvenzhane were filled with nastiness in the comments.

Also for some reason some people think a nine year old girl should not have had a purse shaped like a dog.

I'm going to repeat nine year old girl some more.


Sidefail: The visual effects community sees red in the wake of Oscar protest and on-air snub. They didn't pay a VFX house, people are out of work, and when a guy tried to talk about it at the Oscars they cut the mic.



*Do not take my emphasis on the youth of Quvenzhane Wallis to in any way mean I consider that appropriate to call anyone of any age. I just feel so bad for her. People wouldn't call her by her name in the interviews, MacFarlane made a sex joke about her, and etc, etc, etc.

Blatantly cut and pasted from wank_report. Hat tips to the mice.


Requires Only That You Hate (http://requireshate.wordpress.com/) - Requires Hate for short - is a Thai Chinese lesbian blogger who has been ripping various sexist and racist science fiction/fantasy books apart in her online reviews. She's also better known as winterfox.

About 10 days ago, in one of her posts, Requires Hate posted a link to another person's review of the Inspector Chen books written by Liz Williams: http://requireshate.wordpress.com/2012/07/22/more-links/ (top paragraph).

Liz Williams - mevennen on livejournal - clearly dd not appreciate this. When Catherynne Valente posted about the sexual harassment at Readercon, mevennen's response was to ask whether she feels the same way about Requires Hate as she does about Rene Walling:
http://catvalente.livejournal.com/678836.html?thread=21468596#t21468596

"I don't think ANY of this is acceptable. I don't care whether it's puppy-eyed, I'm-sowwy leching American men, or wannabe sociopathic Chinese women."

Posting in the thread was not enough for Williams, however - she went on to write a long and ranty LJ post calling Requires Hate an "an aspiring fantasy serial killer" and announcing that "in the unlikely event that she is a potential psychonerd like the guy in Aurora, I’ve passed her details on to the relevant authorities and they can act if they see fit. Hey, if I’m going to be accused of being an Evil British Imperialist Whore [Tm] whatever I do, I might as well make the most of it": http://mevennen.livejournal.com/889924.html (comments now screened)

Valente posted a response:

"I believe that people should be able to voice their opinions, even if I disagree with them. Even if I agree sometimes and other times think that in a quest to answer injustice and be heard, they step over the line into cruelty."
http://catvalente.livejournal.com/679023.html

There's some humor in the comments, particularly in the threads involving Nick Mamatas (nihilistic_kid), who is also very outspoken about his likes and dislikes and who listed Requires Hate as an example of a "superior sort of reader" recently: http://nihilistic-kid.livejournal.com/1777161.html


( But wait! There's more! )

Hello, everyone.

There's a site called Goodreads which is a bit like a library, a book review service, and fountain of wank.

This particular sordid tale starts out like promising wank, until the instigators fall off the deep end of wanky into the depths of the pool of 'you are all horrible assholes'.

Summary: Getting a bad review on Goodreads is like being bullied, so the solution these poor beleagured bullying victims come up with is simple: Stalk and terrorize anyone who leaves them a bad review under the guise of 'stopping bullying'.

Here's the links:

Summary of the situation as well as the history which is much more indepth and accurate than what I just said.

Link collection

One of the 'Anti-Bullies' bullying victims. As a reminder, this is all triggered by giving a book a bad review.

QUOTE:

This week, shortly after writing a status update about feeling stalked, I received a call. A woman said, "We can find you, bitch" and then hung up.

Excellent response from one of the targets (see the first link) where she reveals her part pirate heritage and great parenting tips.

Anyway, so that's what's happening in professional publishing this week.

I'm sorry if this loses coherency in parts, I haven't eaten for twelve hours and there's a carpet of slippery comicbooks between me and the fridge. I have to clean, organize, and write down issues before I can eat.

This will be my last known post.

Some Jim Butcher (he writes a fantasy mystery series called the Dresden Files, I think that's the name of the series, anyway) unfunny for you.