Quoted from Leigh Alexander’s blog. Posted without comment, because how could I improve this?
What’s your favorite video game?
Metal Gear Solid 3. It’s a game set in the Cold War that you can play however you want, but those of optimal skill levels aim to play with perfect stealth. Ideally you kill no one, except the person that matters most to you. I’m attracted to ambivalent ascension narratives.
What’s it like being a woman in the game industry?
Like playing Metal Gear Solid 3. You feel a sense of pleasure and mastery so long as you don’t generate noise or movement above a certain acceptable baseline. Call enough attention to yourself and suddenly you’re fighting an unpleasant combat game in which you experience crushing anxiety and virtual pain. I’d like to see that change for us.
via Leigh Alexander.
In Maia Sepp’s novella 
, Olive writes a blog answering etiquette questions for well-mannered survivalists in the semi-collapsed society. Just because the earth grows warmer every year, beachfront property is now underwater property, and infrastructure has all but collapsed, there’s no reason we have to be impolite about it. Olive only mentions a few recent headlines, inspiring the reader to imagine other potentially awkward social situations in a world where hoarding solar panels is an etiquette breach.
, which I read only because my friend James recommended it, and it’s absolutely ruined visiting Asheville for me, 
which I read only because Alicia promised it was really more about journalism and blogging than zombies.
I have mixed feelings on Colleen McCullough’s work. On one hand, Caesar’s Women and the rest of her Rome series are epic and well researched, grand-scale and personal, and basically everything that a historical novel should be. On the other hand, The Independence of Miss Mary Bennett takes the prize for the worst Austenite fiction I’ve ever read, and I’ve read quite a few. I was excited to read and review Bittersweet because I was sure it would either be amazing or dreadful, to the extreme.
