The end of kindness: weev and the cult of the angry young man – Have you heard of the Free Weev movement. Weev is a famed internet hacker who decided a woman on the internet displeased him. In response he released photoshopped pictures of her children in obscene poses. He calls her too fat to be loved and a slut. He distributes her social security number online. No legal agency can help her or will help her.
Andrew “weev” Auerheimer is in jail now but not for harassing one female tech blogger but for releasing the social security numbers of 114,000 AT&T customers.
Auernheimer is part of an internet subculture where might makes right, where the only moral code is for the superior to enforce their will on the inferior.
Women are overwhelmingly the target for this type of internet subculture and that’s true even in the book world. The Verge.
Is This The End For New Zealand Publishing? – This is a pretty interesting look at the state of New Zealand publishing. Basically, in country publishing has been reduced to four multinational conglomerates and the author of the piece fears that New Zealand set books and New Zealand based writers will be forced to shut down their laptops or self publish. Before everyone cries that self publishing is the answer, only 20% of New Zealand’s book sales are digital meaning quite a few still like the paper.
And, only a small percentage (4%) of New Zealand published books are fiction. The exorbitant cost of books, however, may be partly what is hurting New Zealand publishing. Many readers are trying to purchase geo free restricted books at reduced prices or ordering from Book Depository to avoid the VAT tax. The price of books really needs to be examined, in my opinion, should NZ want to continue to publish home grown books to a home grown audience. Stuff.co.nz
Don’t date a girl who reads — Charles Warnke – There is a now famous quote that has been posted on Tumblr blogs and Pinterest boards and on Facebook timelines by Rosemarie Urquico called “You should date a girl who reads.”
If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are…. Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads.
Charles Warnke takes a different tack.
Don’t date a girl who reads. Do those things, because nothing sucks worse than a girl who reads. Do it, I say, because a life in purgatory is better than a life in hell. Do it, because a girl who reads possesses a vocabulary that can describe that amorphous discontent as a life unfulfilled—a vocabulary that parses the innate beauty of the world and makes it an accessible necessity instead of an alien wonder. A girl who reads lays claim to a vocabulary that distinguishes between the specious and soulless rhetoric of someone who cannot love her, and the inarticulate desperation of someone who loves her too much. A vocabulary, god damnit, that makes my vacuous sophistry a cheap trick.
But maybe Mark Grist’s take is even better
Full text here: http://writeoutloud.net/profiles/markgrist
See, some guys prefer asses
Some prefer tits
And I’m not saying that I don’t like those bits
But what’s more important
What supercedes
For me Is a girl a with passion, wit and dreams
So I want a girl who reads