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writer, singer, webwrangler, blogger, comedy tragic | about.me/vivsmythe

  • 2014 Tiptree Awards announced: Byrne and Walton winners

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    The James Tiptree Jr. literary prize for science fiction or fantasy published during 2014 that expands or explores our understanding of gender was announced over the Easter weekend. Congratulations to Monica Byrne and Jo Walton, this year’s winners, and congratulations also to those authors selected for the honour list and the long list.

  • Hands Up Who Saw This Tweet Coming

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    So in Rupert’s world, if you are famous and popular enough to make oodles of money for people like him, then you should be allowed to punch people and everybody else should just shrug and move on.

  • Media Circus: Fraser Condolence Motions Edition

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    Photo of Australian Parliament House (APH) in Canberra

    I missed out on a memorial post for Malcolm Fraser over the weekend, so here is a Media Circus to focus on his achievements.

    What news story/commentary/analysis has grabbed your attention lately?

  • ObEquinox: Happy Turn Of The Seasons To You

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    a photograph of Earth's moon showing a brightly sunlit crescent contrasted against the finally earthlit rest of the surface

    The March equinox happened a little over an hour ago here in Sydney, at 9:45am AEST. APOD, of course, has an informative image for us today, and a London headmaster showed us what not to do when a few voices complain about a school taking note of a once in a lifetime event.

  • Happy Epic Pi Day

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    A pie with the symbol Pi carved into its crust.

    Only really works when one writes the date in that teeth-itch-making USian way, but today, 3.14.15 9:26:53 captures the first ten digits of pi – which happens once a century (according to David Brin on FB).

  • Migration open thread (from Hoyden in Exile)

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    So I’m about to go and disable commenting on posts over at Hoyden About Town so that we can ‘port posts over to the new server without losing anything. In the meantime, please comment here instead!

  • We’re migrating the blog

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    Over the next couple of days HaT’s datafiles will be shifted to a new server. In order to streamline the porting process, we may need to place the site into Maintenance Mode for short periods. So we’ve disabled comments from the front-end and asked our bloggers to not log into the back-end for the next couple of days.

  • Our Unconsciousness regarding Privilege and Bias

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    This is stuff regular readers likely already know, but it’s nice to have links to stuff for others. Two recent op-eds from the NYT discuss how decision makers in a wide range of gatekeeper roles are more likely to make discretionary accommodations for some people than others while not noticing that this is what they’re doing:

  • The Soft Tyranny of Low Expectations: boys shamed for empathising with female protagonists

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    A 15th century painting of a boy reading, artist Frans Hals

    A female author notes how schools keep deciding that boys won’t want to hear her speak about writing, while also deciding that whenever a male author visits the same school that girls will be just as interested in that author as the boys.

  • So, stuff will be happening here soon

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    lithograph of circus trapeze artists

    In the meantime, all comments are closed.