Historically, the final girl in both the novel and cinematic worlds is the virginal white girl. She’s milk and honey personified, naive to a fault, and always in the wrong place at the wrong time. It isn’t until she says the final words of the spell, outsmarts the knife-wielding baddie, beats the devil, and lives that she is a real person. She is a testament to goodness and purity triumphing over wickedness and evil....
As an adult reader of comics, I’m here to tell you (again) that isn’t always the case. It is, in fact, frequently not the case. There is a large portion of my pull list and TPBs I try to make sure my kids don’t see and if they do happen to get ahold, well…let’s say they are quickly divested of the aforementioned. The good news is that DC Zoom and DC Ink—the publisher’s middle grade and young adult imprints, respectively—are here to provide not only kid-and family-friendly content, but stories where young heroes such as Mera, Jonathan Kent, and Damian (excuse me, Ian) Wayne step up to take their places in the pantheon of heroes....
This post seeks to be a primer to those exploring the science fiction genre. Of course, I don’t claim for this to be an end-all-be-all list. There will be sub-genres missing from this list; if I wanted to list them all, I might as well write a book about it. Rather than being exhaustive, it is my hope that this primer serves as a jumping off point for further discussion and brainstorming....
ESTJ – The Supervisor ESTJs are industrious traditionalists whose extroversion often leads them to take charge of situations. They are generally pragmatic and like things to be organized and clear. They are driven by a need to analyze and bring order to the world. ESTJ writers include Amy Chua, E.L. James, Dr. Phil McGraw, Tom Clancy, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Bill O’Reilly, Billy Graham, and Sonia Sotomayor. Learn more about how ESTJs write here....
Organized • Group Oriented • Focused • Conventional • Leader ESTJs are traditionalists who like to take charge of situations. They are pragmatic and like things to be organized and clear. They are driven by a need to analyze and bring order to the world. ESTJs comprise approximately 9% of the general population, 11% of men, and 6% of women. ESTJ characters include Rachel Lynde (Anne of Green Gables), Thresh (The Hunger Games), Vernon Dursley, Dolores Umbridge, Minerva McGonagall, and Hermione Granger (Harry Potter), Cersei Lannister (Game of Thrones), Mycroft Holmes (Sherlock Holmes), Estella Havisham (Great Expectations), and Peter Pevensie (The Chronicles of Narnia)....
My son loves cooking, and he’s gotten me to start cooking more and trying out new recipes, which has been (surprisingly!) fun. Right now, we tend to stick with the basics, especially for pizza, but we do like to add twists to the tomato sauce or use infused olive oils on the crust — little things like that that add a little something to the pizza. He tends to be more daring than I, so I’m excited to see what happens as he gets older and we keep cooking together....
The trial began last week, and journalist John Maher has been live tweeting it. Although I highly doubt that anything I have to say about the following could possibly be more amusing/infuriating/damning than the statements themselves, I do hope to provide a service in A) saving you the time of reading through the thread if all you want is to be enraged, and/or B) amusing you. All quotes come from Maher’s thread....
Their picks include new releases from beloved authors — such as Yellowface by R.F. Kuang, from the writer of the acclaimed 2022 release Babel — and some new names. Here are their choices for the most anticipated fiction books of 2023. Maame by Jessica George Looking for Jane by Heather Marshall What Happened to Ruthy Ramirez by Claire Jimenez The Trackers by Charles Frazier Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano The Half Moon by Mary Beth Keane The Collected Regrets of Clover by Mikki Brammer Yellowface by R....
Wait: Mental Spring Clean? Most of us know about spring cleaning. After months of cold dreary winter days, it’s good to open up your home and let some sunshine in. Clean up the dust, remove the clutter, and let the fresh air in to deal with the stale smells and mildew. Often our mental health needs the same treatment, although it doesn’t have to be in spring. You can do a mental health spring clean at any time of year....
If you want to see the most diverse widely circuited book list online, it’s reliably the ALA Most Challenged Books list. This list is always filled with LGBTQ books and books by and about people of color, particularly Black people. This is 2020, though, so things look a little bit different from previous years. For one thing, 273 books were targeted in 156 challenges, while last year it was 566 in 377 challenges....
Excellent Libby Audiobook Hacks Know Whether You Have Unlimited Data In the days of yore, when data plans were limited and the OverDrive app was just called OverDrive, library patrons learned the hard way that one audiobook download would burn out their entire monthly data allowance. This is why Libby, an infinitely superior app in every single way, defaults to wifi-only downloading. That said, unlimited data has become much more common since the days of yore five years ago....
Somewhere Only We Know by Maurene Goo As all good stories do, Somewhere Only We Know begins with food: Lucky, an exhausted K-pop star, sneaks out of her hotel room and is on the hunt for a hamburger. She meets Jack, a tabloid photographer who doesn’t immediately recognize her. They embark on a spontaneous twenty-four hour tour of Hong Kong. The two find themselves sharing spicy food and sweet moments as they question what they owe to themselves and to the world....
Clark’s second Chicago Mystery, Borrowed Time, came out this past May as a follow up to her first Cass Raines novel, Broken Places. In her multi-nominated (Lefty, Anthony, Shamus) debut, Clark threw Cass Raines straight into the belly of the hardboiled beast. The cop-turned-PI investigated the murder of her father figure priest. So, understandably, as the second book begins, Cass is trying to take life a little easier. But when her favorite food delivery guy asks her to look into a friend’s death, well…you know the rest....
title: “We Re Taking The Day Off " ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-24” author: “Marvin Grotts” Enjoy this #BTS look at our day: via GIPHY title: “We Re Taking The Day Off " ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-30” author: “Lynn Brodersen” In the meantime, here are some great photos of animals with books to bring a smile to your face.
The resulting paper, “Unsupervised Discovery of Gendered Language through Latent-Variable Modeling,” is hardly earth-shaking. In a nutshell, co-authors Alexander Hoyle, Lawrence Wolf-Sonkin, Hanna Wallach, Isabelle Augenstein, and Ryan Cotterell write: “Positive adjectives used to describe women are more often related to their bodies than adjectives used to describe men.” Women are more likely to be called pretty. Men are more likely to be called interesting. Study authors looked for the most common adjectives across 3....
The goal of the study was to highlight the importance of reading from a young age. It bears mentioning that another goal was selling programs at the private, for-profit Christian university. Before showcasing the team’s findings and their neat-looking graphics, a note on methodology. This data does not take into account the fact Dr. Seuss books trended for over a month, following the estate’s decision in March 2021 to discontinue publishing a select number of titles depicting racist images....
More than a decade ago, I started a lesbian and bisexual women book blog, and if I’m being 100% honest, the “bi” part was an afterthought. There just weren’t a lot of bi women books out at the time, so the vast majority of the books covered were lesbian. I also sometimes referred to it as a queer women book blog. If I had started it today, I would probably have called it a sapphic book blog....
1) Don’t overthink it: just get started. I spent a long time considering starting the Lesbrary before I did. I second-guessed myself and planned out content. I thought I had to have everything figured out before I started —but of course, you can only learn by actually doing. I had lots of great ideas about what the blog would look like in those early days, but quickly some things fell to the wayside and others became regular features....
I should take a moment to point out that I am not a literary historian. Experts in the field of literature, I am certain, have dwelt upon this question and continue to do so. In the area of classical antiquity, where my specialty lies, the answer is more straightforward. The works that comprise that canon were deemed worthy of being taught. There is a reason why we know Homer and don’t have almost anything left of the other poems from the epic cycle that were written about the Trojan war (the sources mention several, in passing)....
Spoiler warning: a good comic book cover, like literally all art, is subjective. What clicks for you may be drab and ineffective for someone else. It might be a bit of a “I know it when I see it” situation, but I still think there are some constant and integral components to turning a one-page picture into something that begs to be explored. A pretty important factor is composition, how an artist arranges the elements of art (line, color, form, texture, space, etc....
