link roundup

[julesjones]

I've been too out of sorts to compose a post of my own for the last week, but I have been reading other people's posts. Here are some interesting things I found via Making Light:

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Columnist Dan Savage reacted to the news of a gay teenager's suicide with this:

I had the same reaction: I wish I could have talked to this kid for five minutes. I wish I could have told Billy that it gets better. I wish I could have told him that, however bad things were, however isolated and alone he was, it gets better.

But gay adults aren't allowed to talk to these kids. Schools and churches don't bring us in to talk to teenagers who are being bullied. Many of these kids have homophobic parents who believe that they can prevent their gay children from growing up to be gay—or from ever coming out—by depriving them of information, resources, and positive role models.

Why are we waiting for permission to talk to these kids? We have the ability to talk directly to them right now. We don't have to wait for permission to let them know that it gets better. We can reach these kids.

So here's what you can do, GBVWS: Make a video. Tell them it gets better.

Scroll to the last item on Savage's Sep 23 column for the full details. The YouTube channel is at http://www.youtube.com/itgetsbetterproject

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A professional scribe discusses the making of parchment in the context of materials for making a Torah. It is full of the sort of Interesting Facts About Stuff that fannish types like, not least being the lusting after a giraffe skin in order to make a really long parchment.

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A back of the envelope calculation of the "so many books, so little time" problem, which shows exactly why I have decided that I am no longer going to keep reading a book just because it is there. Now, I used to get through nigh on 400 books a year, but that was back when I was a teenager with lots of free time, no internet, and rather better health than I currently enjoy. I don't think I'm ever going to get back to that rate again, even if I do know at least one person with older and worse eyesight than mine who manages it. James Nicoll reads for a living, so I'm not going to try to compete with him. :-)

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Comments

[green_knight]

I will not get back to a book a day. I get a lot of my reading from the internet these days (and, as I have worked out, get some of the _same kind of reading_ on the internet that I used to get from books), and I spend a lot of my story time _writing_. (And, of course, I no longer attend school - I used to get through an awful lot of books at school.)

[julesjones]

Yes, the internet provides me with a fair chunk of the non-fiction reading I used to get from newspapers in particular -- as witness the linked articles in this post. :-)

[green_knight]

For me, the interesting revelation was that LJ supplants some of my _fiction_ reading. Or semi-fiction: I used to read a lot of animal stories and travellogues, of the 'this is me, these are my animals, this is what we went through' respectively 'this is me, these are the cool places I've visited and this is what I found' variety - fictional, semi-fictional, or autobiographical. And I find that those stories no longer interest me - it's much more interesting to follow my friends in *their* lives, when I can talk to them and interact with them than to read about someone who will never know that I exist. At the moment, there still seems to be a market for that kind of book - particularly if humourous or accompanied by photographs - but I think you'll probably already need a platform. If you write well enough that people read it and want more, you've got a much more interesting product than if you _just_ sit down to write. .