Pulitzer Prize-winning author Harper Lee dropped the proverbial mic after To Kill a Mockingbird and has been living a fruitful life ever since. However, a recent bump in the road has brought her name back into the news. She’s suing her agent over the rights to her famous work, rights she says were stolen using trickery.

For the past two years speculative fiction magazine Strange Horizons has put their researcher’s hat on to look at gender in genre publishing. Specifically they analyze the breakdown of male and female authors, male and female reviewers, and how many books by male and female authors get reviewed.

So what’d they find about genre publishing in 2012? There’s good news and bad news.

If a lot of the pushback against feminist critique of video games, or even the simple assertion that women enjoy playing games and so maybe a studio should consider them to be a valuable demographic, contains a core misconception, it is that the people calling for better representation in the games industry and in the female characters in games think that every man in the industry is an evil women-hating jerk. I mean, come on, those guys have mothers, wives, sisters, and female friends! They don’t hate women!

In fact, if the folks who were responsible for problematic portrayals of female characters or poor representation of real women in games industry were doing it all purely deliberately, it’d probably be a lot easier to fix. The reality is that a lot of this stuff is far more subtle than that, and the sad fact remains that all of us are capable of having noble or even neutral intentions while still overlooking the subtle ways in which we’re contributing to a stereotype, operating on a false assumption, or missing out on a different but important perspective. Case in point, some of the things the creators of The Last of Us have mentioned lately.

Apparently they did. And here I thought it was all fun, games, and eating someone’s hard work…

(via Death and Taxes)

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I never say this but…I think it’s time for a reboot.

I’m not sure anyone I know is truly happy with their privacy settings on Facebook. Either they don’t understand them or, if they do, they find them unsatisfactory. Yet we all keep using the free social networking website. But oddly enough, the site’s privacy settings recently caused some strife in founder Mark Zuckerberg’s family. One of his sister’s photos was posted publicly online even though she thought it was set to private. 

If there’s one thing I don’t like about Twitter, it’s how it’s given people an easy platform to say stupid things that they should have just kept to themselves. Case in point: Author Bret Easton Ellis tweeted that “Kathryn Bigelow would be considered a mildly interesting filmmaker if she was a man but since she’s a very hot woman she’s really overrated.” And the follow-up: “Kathryn Bigelow: Strange Days, K-19 The Widowmaker, Blue Steel, The Hurt Locker. Are we talking about visionary filmmaking or just OK junk?”

Ahhh, I see what’s happening here. Ellis is framing his sexism against Bigelow, the first woman to win an Oscar for Best Directing (because obviously there’s no other explanation for a women achieving success in a male-dominated field than her sleeping around or mesmerizing guys with her boobs or something) as some ass-backwards defense of the integrity of the Oscars.

As you may already know, October is National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Lots of different companies and organizations have projects to raise money for various charities but a recent move by Etsy has raised some eyebrows. They sent out an email with the phrase “Show your love to the women in your life with Breast Cancer Awareness Month” but a blogger realized very few of the items listed actually supported a breast cancer charity. 

You hear that? That’s the sound of my Prometheus-related hopes and dreams falling to the floor and breaking into dozens of pieces. In an interview with Movies.com, Prometheus Blu-ray producer Charles de Lauzirika explained that the Blu-ray special feature linking Prometheus to Blade Runner is nothing more than a funny Easter egg, a nod to the fans who have long speculated as to a possible connection between Alien and Blade Runner universes.

The phrase “post-production 3D conversion” usually evokes a strong reaction in movie goers. Many aren’t fans of 3D in general so when it’s done after the fact, and sometimes against the director’s wishes, it’s even worse. But then there are those times when a director who was previously against the idea, changes his mind. Like Guillermo del Toro with his sci-fi disaster film, Pacific Rim. I’ll let him explain.