Linkspam is going "Eek, it's already almost the end of January!"

[firecat]

Great essay about design of female warrior characters in video games. Because "Not all women have breasts as big as our heads."
https://medium.com/@Ruby_Magatama/on-designing-better-women-in-games-ebe785d8689
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Via silveradept, managing your life when you have impaired executive function (but also could apply to managing when you have other kinds of disabilities).

1. Probably the most important part in my experience: especially if you’re having bad executive function problems, you get a star for every success. Metaphorically speaking. Put the dishes in the dishwasher? Star (even if you didn’t wipe the counters or empty containers out of the fridge or whatever). Put laundry through? Star (even if you didn’t fold it and put it away and you end up using it out of the pile of clean clothes before it gets there). The biggest problem with executive function malfunctions (and this is science!) is that we get caught in horrible self-reinforcing loops: we expect too much, we don’t achieve all of it, we feel awful for not achieving all of it, we get more depressed/upset/stressed/anxious, our exective function goes down. You want to do the opposite: set small, achievable goals and the celebrate your successes.

http://last-snowfall.tumblr.com/post/103741300275/hi-folks-im-asking-for-some-help
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"The Debt: When terrible, abusive parents come crawling back, what do their grown children owe them?" (Spoiler: Nothing, but it's hard for some people to make that choice.)
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/family/2013/02/abusive_parents_what_do_grown_children_owe_the_mothers_and_fathers_who_made.html?wpsrc=sh_all_dt_tw_top
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Cab Calloway's Hepster dictionary ("the first dictionary authored by an African-American" according to Barrelhouse words: a blues dialect dictionary.)
http://www.openculture.com/2015/01/cab-calloways-hepster-dictionary.html
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Coyotes are the third most common carnivore found in The The Tar Pits Tar Pits (sorry, I mean La Brea) and we can study their evolution relative to that of the gray wolf.

...climate change couldn’t account for the shrinking coyotes. Instead, Ice Age coyotes may have been larger because size was an advantage during a time when there was a broader guild of big predators stalking the land. Once the dire wolves, sabercats, and American lions went extinct, competition for prey ceased to be so intense and coyotes became smaller. Also, many of the large prey animals of the Ice Age – such as horses and camels – went extinct, too, meaning less food on the hoof for coyote packs.

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/01/14/how-extinction-changed-the-coyote/
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In praise of non-photogenic food
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jan/14/my-cooking-is-a-mess-and-tastes-better-for-it

Many interesting excerpts from Coming Out Under Fire: The History of Gay Men and Women in WWII by Allan Berubé
http://thingswithwings.dreamwidth.org/219082.html
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Sherlock Holmes (TOS) fans take note.

...literary scholar Clare Clarke has uncovered some long-forgotten texts...as she sets out to examine the detective as criminal, the bad guy as the hero and societies where crimes may well go unsolved – as well as London, the books take in Australia and India. She introduces us to a master of disguise (yes, another one), a dodgy private enquiry agent, all manner of indolent young men about town and a bent copper. There is a moral complexity to a number of these novels, she contends, that has previously been overlooked.

Along the way, Clarke places the burgeoning crime fiction genre in the context of the growth of the police force and the modern bureaucratic state.

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/late-victorian-crime-fiction-in-the-shadows-of-sherlock-by-clare-clarke/2017766.article
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Interviews with various people in the SF publishing world about SF featuring people with disabilities. Thoughtful but misses some stuff I'm surprised it missed. [And now I wish I had written down what those were, because I had something in mind when I first recorded this in my linkspam collection, but now I can't remember what.]
http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2014/09/mind-meld-disabilities-in-speculative-fiction/

Comments

[jesse_the_k]

Nice cozy linkspam, deserves a wool hat and fuzzy slippers! Due to problems addressed in #2, may not remember to report back on #9, but have written it down :,)

[firecat]

I'm knitting my linkspam a scarf!

[rhivolution]

Thanks for sharing the one about abusive parents--it's something that's come to the forefront with me lately and while I don't always agree with Yoffe's advice, this topic was something I needed to read right now.

[firecat]

I'm glad it helped, and sorry it's relevant to you.

[sasha_feather]

The SF signal one was posted at access-fandom, and the person there critiqued the inclusion of the Ship who Sang.

http://access-fandom.dreamwidth.org/90518.html

[firecat]

Thanks for sharing that. Good critique. I disagreed with quite a few of the recommendations.

[legionseagle]

Oh, dear; a morning when I find myself agreeing with Emily Yoffe.

With respect to the Victorian crime novelists who aren't Conan Doyle, though; I'm shocked that the TES does not mention both female writers of detective fiction (M.E.Braddon, at her peak, was probably outselling Arthur Conan Doyle, was arguably the author of the first English detective novel - Lady Audley's Secret - and took a keen interest in both stage and film adaptations of her work) and on female detectives at that period.

[firecat]

Thanks for mentioning those!

[selki]

Ooh, I've read Wilkie Collins' *The Woman In White*, and M.E. Braddon's *Lady Audley's Secret* looks like an interesting sort of response.

[firecat]

Ooh!