Beyond Selidor

This week's post goes from the sublime to the ridiculous (but mainly focuses on the sublime).

To start off, an absolutely fabulous roundtable on diversity. The participants are Aliette de Bodard, Zen Cho, M Sereno, Bogi Takács and JY Yang, moderated by Charles Tan.

Over at Ladybusiness, Renay has created a fabulous summer (or winter) reading recommendation list.

On a sadder note, Tanith Lee has died. Athena Andreadis has written a lovely tribute. Sophia McDougall shared an old anecdote about meeting Lee.

There are a lot of new updates at Where Ghostwords Dwell.

Sophia McDougall has posted an excerpt of Space Hostages, which will be published really soon.

You can enter a giveaway to win an ARC of House of Shattered Wings by Aliette de Bodard here.

I saw Mad Max: Fury Road this week and absolutely adored it. (If I had endless money and more time on my hands, I would have seen it at least five more times since Tuesday.) This essay by Tansy Rayner Roberts goes a long way towards explaining why.

I found this post by Kaye Wierzbicki over at The Toast very moving. (Content note: discussion of abortion.)

This is the last week of A Softer World and I am really not okay. This and this are probably my favourite recent comics of theirs.

Natalie Luhrs is reading what looks to be a terrible book for a good cause. I encourage everyone who has the ability to donate. I will be donating to an equivalent UK-based charity.

This post's title comes from my favourite Eurovision song this year, which didn't win. This did not bother me in the slightest.

I've had about a million tabs open on both my laptop and iPad for ages, so I felt I should make a linkpost in order to get rid of them. The result will probably be fairly incoherent.

First up, What We Talk About When We Talk About Hating Garden State by Jesse David Fox. I can't quite work out what I think about this. My thoughts about Garden State are so confused and muddy. When I watched it (the first and only time), it spoke to me profoundly. This was before I really thought about issues of representation, had heard of (or noticed) Manic Pixie Dream Girls or had any understanding of mental illness.* And I've heard all the criticisms of the film, and they are extremely valid. And yet...

There are a lot of movies, much worse movies, that are as emo, as self-aggrandizing, and that feature an even more manic manic pixie dream girl, but Garden State is the one we talk about. Have you seen the well-soundtracked garbage that was Elizabethtown (the movie that first inspired the term "manic pixie dream girl")? And that's the difference — Garden State was good enough to define the things that we come to hate in certain movies (and certain characters and people). It's become a symbol for its blend of quirky, twee, morose, earnest, precious, hipsterness, and it's resented for it. We've confused its influence for cliché.

This is true. Everything Fox says in that article is true. But it doesn't really excuse Garden State (or Girls, or any of the other texts criticised in the article) its flaws. But I think it's a valid point to keep in mind.

This next post by the DIY Couturier, 'Tips to Keep Your Shit Together When You're Depressed' is like a thunderclap of awesome. Obviously I should warn you that the post deals with issues of depression, so stay away if that's something you don't want to read. But it was the first time that I saw someone deal with the day-to-day struggle of depression in such a compassionate and empathetic way. It made me cry.

This piece of art is simply extraordinary. Read the information at the bottom, as it explains the minor controversy surrounding attribution for the art and quote it contains.

My awesome friend lucubratae has a profile up on the National Young Writers' Month website, because he is amazing.

I signed up on Deviant Art simply so I could follow this fabulous webcomic by Pika-la-Cynique. It's called Girls Next Door, and it's a rather hilarious scenario in which Sarah from Labyrinth and Christine from The Phantom of the Opera are housemates who live in the same building as (among others) Jareth and Erik and thus have to confront their stalkers on a daily basis. The whole thing takes a very light-hearted approach to stalking and harassment, which ordinarily would irritate me a lot, but the concept is so cleverly executed that I overlook that particular issue.

Yesterday's A Softer World hurts my heart. Read it. Read the alt-text especially. Weep.

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*I remember in high school getting into a screaming row with a friend about medication for mental illness and just generally Not Getting It. I wish I could take those thoughts and words back.