Month / June 2020

Buffy holds a book and looks around.
by Nerdy Spice

BuffyWatch: Season 4, Episodes 1-3

Janes (a True Stan) and Nerdy Spice (a New Fan) are watching all of Buffy together and comparing notes. Warning: May contain spoilers for later episodes.

Season 4, Episode 1 “The Freshman”

Buffy’s off to college–and she has a roommate, Kathy, from whom she has to keep her secret identity secret, which as we all know she’s GREAT at. She’s extremely nervous, in contrast to Willow who’s excited for every class and every protest. And things don’t go super great for her: she gets yelled at by a professor for whispering in class, she can’t get into the one class she kind of wants, and the first cute guy she meets can’t remember her name because he’s more interested in talking shop with Willow about Psych 105, while the second cute guy gets turned into a vampire by a ring of goth stoner vamps that like to eat college freshmen and then just pack up their rooms and take their stuff and leave a good-bye note so that no one realizes they died. (I guess the parents never bother calling the school to find out what happened when their kids don’t come home for Thanksgiving. Just roll with it.)

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by Nerdy Spice

Our Favorite Books By Black Authors

Recently the #publishingpaidme hashtag highlighted on Twitter just how absurd the discrepancies between advances for Black authors and non-Black authors are in publishing. For example, NK Jemisin’s famous Broken Earth Trilogy? She got $25K advance for each book. Jesmyn Ward had to fight to get a six-figure advance (a number frequently bestowed upon White debut authors with no track record) after winning the National Book Award.

If you’re White (or non-Black) and you’re anything like us, this hashtag (and the recent uprising against police brutality and racism in general) may have made you redouble your commitment to reading works by Black voices. Anyway, here are some of our favorites, old and new. Some of them we’ve written about before, some we somehow haven’t mentioned yet. Check it out, and follow the links to purchase from Bookshop, which supports independent bookstores with each purchase!*

*We’re not grown-up bloggers, so we don’t get any money ourselves… we just want to stick it to Jeff Bezos.

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Buffy holds a big knife at the ready.
by Nerdy Spice

BuffyWatch: Season 3, Episodes 21-22

Note to our readers: The following post is trivial in comparison to what’s going on in the world, and we recognize that. We stand with the Black Lives Matter movement, with George Floyd, with the protesters and with all who are standing up against racism and police violence. Black lives matter!

Janes (a True Stan) and Nerdy Spice (a New Fan) are watching all of Buffy together and comparing notes. Warning: May contain spoilers for later episodes.

Season 3, Episode 21 “Graduation Day, Part 1”

So, Graduation Day is finally (almost) here. As far as we know, Buffy and Angel are still broken up, but… come on. It’s a tossup. Everyone’s nostalgic, including a blonde popular girl who was always mean to Willow, and Percy, Willow’s dumb, muscular tutee, who thanks her for not beating him up again like that time she was Evil Vamp Willow. Except for Xander, who’s convinced he’s going to die, because as we know, Graduation Day is also Ascension Day. The Mayor is going to be the graduation speaker, on the very day his plan is to turn into a demon and “snack on populace.” Not a good sign for the seniors.

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