Author / Nerdy Spice

Posts by Nerdy Spice

http://advers.io Formerly "kht" I grew up playing Disney-movie-based games with my baby sister. I majored in English in college, got a graduate degree in creative writing, and then found myself earning a living as a software engineer. I'm working on my second novel and querying agents for my first. I eats home-cooked meals only when my husband Keets makes them for me, and he is still trying to teach me how to turn on the oven. Interests: Victorian novels, modern MFA novels and I'm not ashamed of it, super-long novels that aren’t by David Foster Wallace, Michael Chabon, Claire Messud, Henry James, feminism, movies with Robert Downey Jr. in them, TV shows with Connie Britton in them, Pacey Witter, 90s teenybopper movies with training montages, The Good Wife, Homeland, Tina Fey’s entire oeuvre, Mindy Kaling’s entire oeuvre, shows from the WB/CW circa 2004, and JJ Abrams.
by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 6/23/17

This woman has been slowly eating Infinite Jest for a year. We don’t really know why, but we support it.

If you, like us, are always just a few days behind on The Handmaid’s Tale, you may have missed Variety‘s fun, engaging interview with Elizabeth Moss about the finale.

Or, you might want to check out a pair of what I can only describe as cerebral fanwanks about hair and music in The Handmaid’s Tale at LA Review of Books.

Damon Lindelof might be doing a Watchmen series on HBO! And before you get upset, Zack Snyder he is not. He did wonders with The Leftovers by departing from the source material in meaningful ways.

This is the best tweet about the news, which came out right around the time Lord and Miller dropped out of the Han Solo prequel:

 

At Book Riot via The Millions, five writers inspired by Octavia Butler, whose birthday was Thursday, write about her influence on them. I happen to be in the middle of Fledgling and I’m loving it, so it’s a timely topic for me!

by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 6/16/17

Do you know about the creepy surrealist Youtube star Poppy? This article about her is fascinating, but what really fascinated me was just watching her “I’m Poppy” video. (via Wired)

After some anxious sponsors backed away from the notorious Trumpian production of Julius Caesar, Alexandra Petri for the Washington Post cheekily identified reasons why pretty much no plays should be acceptable to sponsors. For example, in As You Like It, “Woman wandering in the woods to get away from the current regime is portrayed as some sort of hero.” VERY inappropriate.

Rebecca Solnit argues in Harper’s that the mythical Cassandra is the feminine inverse of The Boy Who Cried Wolf: from Anita Hill to Cosby’s victims to Trump’s accusers and in countless other examples, men can lie over and over again and be believed, while women can tell the truth time and time again and be dismissed.

A poet who wasn’t getting any traction on Instagram conducted a social experiment in which he posted the most banal, non-sensical lines he could think of–and he immediately got thousands and likes and followers, many of whom were not in on the joke.

The New Yorker‘s Doreen St. Felix walks us through Bill Maher’s awkward, graceless apology–and why we probably shouldn’t accept it.

Wonder Woman holds a shield in one hand and a sword in the other, with a gleam of sunlight behind her.
by Nerdy Spice

See Wonder Woman. It’s “neat.”

I didn’t see Wonder Woman in an all-female screening. In fact, I was with Keets, and we were sitting near at least two groups of men who had come with no women at all. Which was a good thing, from my perspective; it’s nice to live in a city where people’s appetite for cliché-ridden action movies seems to depend more on their quality than the gender of the top-billed actor.

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by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 5/5/17

The Huffington Post published a fascinating and somewhat contentious oral history of Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, which had its twentieth birthday this week.

“Fuck that guy”, writes a fictional J.K. Rowling, claiming she is not at all sorry she killed Cedric Diggory. “If I had my way, the entire fifth book of the series would have been a long description of what a terrible time Cedric Diggory was having in hell.” (via Above Average)

Guess what ELSE is being adapted on streaming TV these days: Anne of Green Gables! This may be even more exciting than Handmaid’s Tale, although nothing will ever replace Megan Follows and Jonathan Crombie in our hearts. The NYT wrote a long feature about how the new adaptation brings out the darker side of Anne’s lonely, maltreated childhood that was always present but subtextual in the books.

Viet Thanh Nguyen writes in the New York Times that writing workshops can be hostile environments to minorities, because they often reinforce established power structures.

At Full Stop, Fran Bigman writes of the importance of female friendships as an act of resistance in The Handmaid’s Tale.

Two women in matching dresses, one pink (Michele), one blue (Romy), walk down a hallway looking fierce.
by Nerdy Spice

20 Times Romy and Michele Had the Perfect Quote For The Occasion

Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion, the movie that changed the way we all think about Post-Its, came out twenty years ago this April. Which makes two whole decades that I have been quoting this movie at every possible opportunity.

In honor of this important milestone, here are the top 20 times that Romy and Michele had the perfect thing to say for any occasion you can possibly think of:

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Maia is seen hugging a man who is her father. She has her eyes closed and a sad expression.
by Nerdy Spice

The Good Fight Review: 1×10 “Chaos”

So this episode was where we got to find out the answer to the question the Kings have perhaps unwittingly posed: Is it easier to write a great ten-episode season than a great twenty-two-episode season? Or, more specifically, would having a ten-episode season enable the Kings to write a flawlessly brilliant season, as they often implied it would? For background, the Kings, bless their hearts, sometimes responded to implied criticisms of The Good Wife‘s more uneven moments with the defense that cable television shows have it so durn easy with only ten episodes a year. So now that the first season of The Good Fight is over, we can see if their theory panned out!

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by Nerdy Spice

Links We Loved This Week — 4/28/17

The internet is super excited about Hulu’s new adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale (as are we, and not just because Rory is in it, we swear).

We missed this when it first came out a couple weeks ago: Brian Edwards penned a nuanced exploration of Homeland‘s attempts this season to interrogate and perhaps undo the Orientalism it hath already wrought, and the “double bind” it faces by still needing to play on our suspense and anxieties. Very worth reading. (at the LA Review of Books)

The SCP Foundation just wrapped its contest for writing SCP-3000. If you haven’t come across the Foundation before in your Internet itinerations, you can think of it as a collaboratively-written X-Files—the contest is a particularly interesting way to see how something like that comes together.

Previously.tv summarizes season 1 of ER in one headline per episode. There are many gems, but my favorite is “Oh My God We Get It Jen And Mark Like To Fuck (Not That The Interminable “Ma Benton Needs To Go In A Home” Arc That Starts Here Is Much Of An Improvement).”