Oh, Firefox, I love your add-ons, but your memory leaks are killing me. And by “killing me” I mean “forcing me to restart you a lot more than I’d like to because of those damn memory leaks.”
Well guess what! One Men’s Rights Redditor has figured out the cause of these memory leaks, and all of Firefox’s other issues. It was Social Justice Warriors all along!
Hmm. I’m pretty sure Brendan Eich ushered himself out the door because his support of Prop 8 had caused a virtual revolt in the Mozilla community. You know, the people without whom Firefox could not continue to exist as a viable piece of software. But whatever. Somehow Firefox would be magically bug-free if the dude the Mozilla community rejected had stuck around anyway because … Men’s Rights?
Fur dudes who like to think of themselves as master logicians these guys aren’t terribly logical a lot of the time.
H/T — r/againstmensrights
So, on the one hand, how dare you pay attention to what this person is wearing, pay attention to his Mad Skills! His Talent! Only his output of work should matter! You can’t judge a person by what they wear!
On the other hand, a) let’s dissect in minute detail what that rape victim was wearing to cause her to be raped, and b) the (non-military) vocations most likely to have a dress code imposed are overwhelmingly female-coded. Never mind about your skills, look at what you’re wearing! How can you expect to be taken seriously when you’re dressed like a prude/slut?
The flautist is getting a drumstick to the crotch.
A book can only be judged by its cover if the author is female. In which case, the publisher has already decided to market it as Chick Lit, and will accordingly dress it up in pink cupcake icing frills.
If a man wrote the same thing, it would be considered Serious Reading.
I was going to say, someone should tell the drummer that he isn’t going to get a very satisfying sound out of the other guy’s balls. Not enough reverberation, you see.
Could produce an interesting high-pitched screechy noise, though.
One of my very serious fears is that a publisher will take my war adventure and make it look like “women’s literature.” Like this. (Yes, that’s a WWII espionage novel, can’t you tell?)
http://www.amazon.com/Trapeze-Simon-Mawer/dp/1590515277/ref=sr_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1415941079&sr=8-4&keywords=trapeze
And they even did that to a dude’s book (or someone writing with a dudeonym, anyway)!
@DrMcCoy
Again, thanks for clarifying. I switched to Debian three months ago, mainly because Ubuntu (and it’s light fork Lubuntu) decided to pull the “only newer laptops need apply” crap on its users, and kept giving me a “Memory Warning” message whenever I put the 14.04 installation CD.
In retrospect, the fact that the Monkey Scripts don’t work probably have more to do with my LXDE Debian distro, rather than the browser itself. Nevertheless, I am otherwise quite satisfied with my Debian’s performance and the Monkey Scripts aren’t really essential, so I am sticking with it.
Yeah, he’s a dude. But it’s a book about a lady spy, and therefore for women, and you’ve got to make that clear, amirite?
Ow, I just sprained my eyes rolling them too hard!
I gave up on covers a long time ago. I buy books based on synopsis and reviews. And if they won the Booker Prize. And if a favourite author is the writer (Atwood, Bryson, Reichs, for example).
I didn’t read the Discworld series for years, because I hated the Josh Kirby covers so much.
Butbutbut the Josh Kirby covers are glorious!
No, they’re not. And that was also why I didn’t read them for years. 😛
Neutral cover review: The book cover has pictures on the outside, but not in the inside. The cover is a drawing, in the style of a cartoon. The artwork includes colours. The name of the book and the author are printed on the front cover.
Mrmagnificent has a trick, at least for fiction. Read the first page. If you don’t like that, don’t buy the book. You won’t miss very many books that you later regret having bypassed.
I second that, and then I also add: “Then flip 80 pages” and read that – if you’re interested in seeing how people got from the intro to where you found yourself after flipping randomly, you’re holding a book you’d like to read.
Plus, a book that doesn’t annoy you 80 pages in.
If it’s about a spy then why is there a picture of a hugging couple on the cover? Did the publishers actually read the book?
Thus Spake Zaramildlymagnificent:
Hmmmm. I read a lot of sci-fi. The fashion these days seems to be starting in media res and unpacking the backstory of your setting a piece at a time over the first half of the book… so a lot of otherwise excellent sci-fi novels are slow starters. For example, I’m currently reading Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie, which is excellent (it won a 2014 Hugo), but if I’d had to judge it on the first page, or even the first chapter, I’d probably be indifferent about it. I’m glad it works for Mrmagnificent, but I don’t think it would work for me. 🙂
(But yeah, go read Ancillary Justice. It’s gooood.)
I suppose I should admit that he doesn’t read very much fiction. His test certainly works if someone’s offering to lend you a book. If they say it’s good/OK _and_ it passes the first page test then you’re probably going to be reasonably pleased with it.
Well, a couple does hug at one or two points. So, obviously, cover material. *is suddenly tempted to put romance-novel makeout pictures on the cover of every action/adventure/spy/war book in which a man ever kisses a woman*
I blame it on James Bond. They’re trying to convince potential readers that every spy novel is The Spy Who Shagged Me.
Interestingly, I found the first chapter in Ancillary Justice completely hooked me and I wasn’t expecting it (I picked up some of the Hugo nominees because of the whole Hugo debate this year). It’s a great novel.
I’m grateful that the library editions of Discworld I’ve found had relatively neutral* covers.
I did get a Discworld day at a time desk calendar as a gift ever so long ago, when I was still working. Don’t remember who the artist was, but it was bloody brilliant. Completely changed how I envisioned Vetinari and Vimes, to begin with.
*As in, not coloring how I imagined the story within.
Uff, that sucked.
Reminds me of the most recent cover of Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (that I saw on store shelves, anyway). I have a vintage paperback that’s slowly disintegrating, so I figured I’d better replace it with a fresh copy. My existing copy is great: Two planets, side by side, on the cover, which fairly evokes the content: one scientist, travelling between two different worlds. The version I saw looked all pastelly and romance-novelly, with a strong silent dude shuffling his toes in some sand. Bleah! I never did buy that fresh copy. Too tone-deaf. I’m making do with some clear packing tape on my old one instead.
That is the same cover art as my hardbound copy had before it was shredded, bins.