Parenthetical.net

One last piece of dystopiana: Research Reveals That Apocalyptic Stories Changed Dramatically 20 Years Ago.
Chanda Phelan wrote this article based on her thesis, for which she looked at a ton of apocalyptic literature from 1826 to 2007 and charted the nature of the apocalypse. Click the image at the top of the article for a [...]

[Read more →]

That’s right, Parenthetical.net has been synonymous with me for eleven years. That makes internet-me the same age as LiveJournal and the word “blog.”
I started my “web journal” as a perpetually single 20-year-old on the day before Valentine’s Day. I was really, really bitter about it.
Dear 20-Year-Old Me, this video is for you:

(It’s from [...]

[Read more →]

This recent xkcd makes an excellent point. This is why I always loved the end of Labyrinth when all the critters tell Sarah that they’ll come “should you need us” — and then she cries that she needs them and they come rock out in her bedroom! Because they didn’t just mean the [...]

[Read more →]

If you write, or care about writing, or teach students who write, you must read “Writing English as a Second Language”. It’s a talk William Zinsser gave to new international students at the Columbia Graduate School for Journalism, and it’s so brilliant it made me choke up a little.
It helped me understand the writing [...]

[Read more →]

I wanted to link to John Green’s recent post about genre because I think this thought is so damn neat:

The main reason books are organized the way they are is that it makes it easier to sell them at bookstores and circulate them at libraries. As acquiring (and reading) books become less physical experiences, we’ll [...]

[Read more →]

Generate your own science fiction/fantasy plot! (Based on the original Electro-Plasmic Hydrocephalic Genre-Fiction Generator 2000.)
Is there something wrong with me that a lot of these actually sound worth reading?

[Read more →]

This summarizes every movie about urban public school teachers ever:
Nice White Lady.

[Read more →]

Sadly, this post isn’t really about the intersection of those things. (Though if you can think of one, I know a few people who’d want to read it!) I’m just smooshing these two links into one post:
Eldritchhobbit at the LJ community YALitLovers has posted a lengthy list of YA dystopias. (I’ve read [...]

[Read more →]

Or at least, a cake pan:
Check out a cake pan from your library
Apparently they have Spiderman and enchanted castles!
Because I’m a librarian, my first thoughts were: a) that must be expensive to send through interlibrary loan, and b) which low-level employee gets stuck with scrubbing the poorly cleaned cake pans? I know, I’m such [...]

[Read more →]

In the immortal words of Jeremy Piven in Grosse Pointe Blank: “Ten years! Ten years! Ten! Years!” Yes, believe it or not, I have owned this domain for an entire decade. It’s been home to everything from passive-aggressive collegiate angst to stories of my travel adventures to this YA lit [...]

[Read more →]