Along the lines of others I’ve enjoyed, I’ve started doing a weekly Sunday link roundup over at my Dreamwidth/Livejournal, and it seems appropriate to post it here as well.

So let’s get to it.

• “Caught in the Middle – Hard Publishing News”. YA Author Stephanie Burgis on why the spat between Simon & Schuster and B&N is potentially costing her a whole fuck of a lot. And is gross. Like seriously gross.
  

  When I walk into a bookstore, as a reader, I rarely notice the books that aren’t stocked there. Maybe, if I’m looking for one book in particular, I’ll be disappointed if I don’t see it, but I won’t really think anything of that. I’ll just think, oh, well, this particular store didn’t stock it.

• Jeremy Antley on drones and war games, and the epistomological/ontological effects of using one over the other in the fighting of wars.
  

  Even though war games grant time unlimited space, drones, bound by the laws of physics, cannot make such grand bargains with time and, in fact, have no need to bargain at all. With drone ideology, how could something not planned occur?

• “Helpful Advice For Talking To Men Who Think Misandry Is A Thing”. Just read it.
  

  There might be a lot of women in your life who are mean to you, but that’s just women not liking you personally. Women are allowed to not like you personally, just like you are allowed to not like us personally. It’s not misandry, it’s mis-Kevin-dry. Or, you know, whoever you are. It is not built into our culture or codified into law, and you can rest assured that most women you encounter are not harboring secret, latent, gendered prejudices against Kevins that could cost you a job or an apartment or your physical sanctity. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t isolated incidents wherein mean women hurt men on purpose. But it is not a systemic problem that results in the mass disenfranchisement of men.

• One of the few surviving unfiltered, unedited sound recordings of a nuclear explosion. Use earbuds/headphones, crank volume.
• “Obama Loves Queers! (Except Not)” Old, but with the SCOTUS business freshly pertinent. Why I actually have serious issues with the push for marriage equality.
  

  Until we stop giving value to certain kinds of relationships over others, until we stop projecting our personal values onto the lives of other consenting adults and making laws about it, until we stop being distracted by the crumbs that the few people in power throw at us so that we are too busy fighting over them to see that the actual pie is still forever off-limits to us, we’ll never break down these oppressive systems that let a few people through the door just so they can help hold it closed to the masses of people still being kept on the other side.

• Over at Cyborgology, Jenny Davis further refines some important concepts in the whole digital dualism/augmented reality debate.
  

  I argue that a formulation of the material conditions of physicality and digitality should be relational rather than oppositional. That is, if we understand the physical and digital to be always co-present, the question is how physical and digital relate to one another within an artifact, space, place etc. I therefore argue that we can understand these relations in terms of integration and juxtaposition.

• “Surface, Sociopaths, and Spring Breakers”. I need to see this fucking movie.
  

  In a fair world, or at least one less crippled by stupidity and mediocrity, James Franco’s “Look at my shit” speech from Spring Breakers (2013) would be one of the scenes featured in the Academy’s “Best Picture” clip-reel at next year’s Oscars.

• And I wrote a thing. “Cyborg Writing: becoming the tools”
  

  When we imagine, when we see and hear and feel words inside of us, we run up against the barrier of our skulls and skin, the membrane that separates the might be from the is. Writing collapses the barrier. Writing is the breaking down of walls and the sundering of boundaries. When we speak of enmeshing, writing is the first act of the mesh.

Play us off: New motherfucking M83.