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Fantastic news: Me, getting to diversify the eerie Victoriana strand of my reading list, thanks to this new longread about female Victorian horror writers.

(it's unsurprising but still an irritant, that my sources are dominated by comfortable white men)

Terrible news: it's expensive and challenging and in some cases, you're looking for a single 1930s reprint, to access texts by the male authors in this field who aren't Lovecraft or Dickens. James, Blackwood, more Machen and Dunsanay have been on my christmas list for years now, and I really don't want to make Lovecraft the touchpoint for how I talk about this, because you know Lovecraft, but...

...and I imagine the little-known women of this genre are even harder to access in, say, a 25p second-hand paperback surfacing in the junk shop of an isolated rural village.

(no subject)

OK YEAH time to plug Handheld Press, and their anthologies Women's Weird 1 & 2; British Weird; and a book of stories by the fantastically named Eleanor Mordaunt. How very exciting.

https://www.handheldpress.co.uk/shop/fantasy-and-science-fiction/james-machin-ed-british-weird/

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ANYWAY yesterday someone refused to let me walk away from a conversation, over a period of like...six hours...and I am cranky af and not really in the mood to go back to it, even though I am now Extremely Aware that "just not responding when I want your attention will redouble my efforts to get it" is a thing, and ARGLE.

Like, I'm not really angry about the subject matter, if that makes sense - I have some strong opinions, but it's not a topic where I care that much about changing people's minds, some people are just wrong; but yeah, I am angry about being stuck in this "the only end state for this conversation I will accept is your agreement" loop. It's like, a social justice version of "if you can't take the heat, stay out of the kitchen"; if your politics rests on making absolutist statements and publically criticising one another, then accept that sometimes you're going to be absolutely wrong and need to accept your criticism with grace. But its not about activism; it's about winning, which is why nothing but the experience of Having Won is good enough, and damned if I'm going to give that to anybody on a subject this important.

You know, I'm going to go back to it sometime today, and it will be a Wall of people just choosing not to give it a rest and move on to something else, and I don't want to deal with it. We're in the middle of a global crisis; let people avoid conflict.

(no subject)

Thursday afternoon anti-capitalist distress

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