People who suck at multitasking don’t realize they suck. http://t.co/sUpHMMrhGB pic.twitter.com/56dIHx1rMf
— Co.Design (@FastCoDesign) March 10, 2014
The Left in NZ are simply incompetent. The PM (Centre Right) has announed the election on 20th September but… it’s too much work to pull up the gimp or Photoshop and change the text… 
Sunshine Mary notices something that any lover of English knows. The bastards did not only drawn up the drawbridge to great literature with postmodern theory, but they have left their dung behind and called it good.
Surely I am not the only parent who has noticed the startling decline in the quality of children’s literature? I first began thinking about this about ten years ago, when my husband and I noticed that many of the picture story books that had the Caldecott Medal Winner sticker on them were so…weird. The books were uninteresting to children and sometimes even frightened them, but I’m sure they were intriguing to the highly-educated, liberal parents of our generation who were raised to see things that are “alternative” as superior. This is the basic ethos of progressivism; anything new and strange, no matter how objectively crappy, is better than what came before. Weird, disturbing children’s books must be better than the simple, charming types of stories that came before, right? We have continued to notice this trend as our children have gotten older. One year awhile back, we joined a mother-daughter book club at the library. One of the first books that was assigned to us was called The Higher Power of Lucky. We were given a free copy of the book to read, and let me tell you, it was dreadful. It was equal parts morbid and boring. The ten-year-old main character is a girl named Lucky whose mother died from being electrocuted during a storm; her father is unaccounted for and she lives with her father’s first ex-wife in an old trailer in a depressing desert town. She is obsessed with Charles Darwin for some reason and the primary adventure in the story seems to center around Lucky eavesdropping outside AA meetings and worrying that her guardian will abandon her. Librarians are obsessed with this book. It is everywhere; it is one of their most highly recommended books. Just now we have returned from the library and there were five copies of the audio book on the shelf. Five copies! Audio books are expensive, and it always takes them ages to order the classic ones that I request, but somehow we have money for five copies of this book. No one ever checks them out, but I’m sure it makes the librarians feel very cheerful and progressive to see them on the shelf. There were several other books that we read for that book club, all equally strange and uninspiring. Modern children’s books usually have main characters who are female, have an intense grrrll power message, and often involve scenes in which girls behave unethically to get what they want. I can’t recall the name of the book at the moment, but I allowed our girls to listen to a modern story on audio book last summer about three cousins (all girls) who stay with their grandmother for the summer. The girls – all grrrl-powered up of course – lie, steal, gossip, sneak out, sneak around, and none of this is portrayed in the story as a negative thing.
Oh… yes. We used to read good stuff at high school. In the last year, I was reading James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Shakespeare (which we had read every year in senior school) and Alexander Pope. My sons were set the Hunger games… and it is horrible. A quick comparison with the latest missive from a commercial writer (I think I used Ringo, it does not matter) indicated that the commercial writer was far better. The progressives have taken over the science fiction publishers and are now wondering why everyone is reading Military SF…
@Sillymagoosa A reader emailed me to say the same thing about sci-fi.He said many ppl are noticing a general decline in the quality of lit.
— Sunshine Mary (@SunshineMarySSM) March 10, 2014
Larry Correia (who I need to add to the useful fools list or the Dark Enlightenment one: he is a good writer who does not get offended about such trivia. Notes…
Up next, in SAD PUPPIES NEWS, the Typical WorldCon Voter once again showed their ass to the world and demonstrated that they are too PC to live.
So the Hugo awards (you should have your PINs by now so don’t forget to nominate Warbound before the end of the month to combat PRS!) will be held in London this year. Neil Gaiman, who is about as close to a rock superstar as you get in this industry, is friends with Johnathan Ross, who is the British equivelent of Jay Leno or David Letterman. Gaiman asked Ross to host the Hugo ceremony. Ross (who normally gets like a hundred grand to host an event) VOLUNTEERED to do it for FREE. He’s hosted ComicCon and the Eisner awards (events bigger than like five or six WorldCons put together) and is also a sci-fi geek, has written sci-fi comics, and his wife is a Hugo winning sci-fi author so he actually likes this stuff, plus he’s got 3 MILLION Twitter followers, so that’s kind of a no brainer for publicity for our struggling, shrinking genre, right?
Oh hell no.
http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2014/03/jonathan-ross-and-hugo-awards-why-was-he-forced-out-science-fictions-self-appointed
Those of you who want to end Puppy Related Sadness won’t be surprised to know that instead of saying “Yay! Publicity! Increased Book Sales for the nominees!” one of the authors got upset that Ross, being a comedian, might make fat jokes. And that made her feel unsafe. What’s the matter LonCon? You promised to make me feel safe. No. I shit you not.
Putting aside the whole thing where words make you unsafe bullshit, and how a con doesn’t just need to protect you from sexual harrassement but also the potential that somebody somewhere may actually utter words that hurt your self esteem, surely the Typical WorldCon Voter would be grown up enough to say put your big girl panties on and move on with life.
Of coure not. So then SMOF, being SMOF, immediately got their outrage on, lit up their torches and pulled out their pitchforks and began mercilessly attacking Ross. Not for anything he’d actually done mind you, but because of what he MIGHT do, never mind all of the evidence to the contrary of him being a professional in hosting award shows that dwarf the Hugos.
And Ross isn’t exactly a right winger. He’s British.
So the brigade of yippy attack dogs began nipping at him, flinging poo, and all of the usual character assassination stuff outspoken authors like me have been putting up with for years. “Why do you want all the fat people to die you hafeful 1%er?” When Ross defended himself and (being a comedian) tried to mock those mocking him, then it turning into “You sound angry.” “Yes, so angry.” “More examples of why you shouldn’t host, you hateful rage monster.” so on and so forth.
Of course, those of us who spend our lives yanking these people’s chains already have a checklist and bingo card ready for these sorts of predictable things, http://larrycorreia.wordpress.com/2013/09/20/the-internet-arguing-checklist/ we are used to their tantrums and immunized by being actual grown ups with lives, but since this was mostly lefties eating lefties, all of the hate and character assassination came as a surprise to them.
So Ross dropped out. His daughter tried to defend her father by pointing out that she was overweight and so Ross was sensitive to that sort of thing, but NOOOOOOOOOoooo, this is our designated outrage of the week and facts will not stand in our way! His sci-fi author wife and daughter had to quit Twitter because they got so hounded by caring liberals.
Well, yeah. Liberals don’t care. This is one of the great truisms of this century, along with never invade Russia and do not feed the trolls.
@SunshineMarySSM Yeah, modern fiction seems to be about people sitting around mostly doing nothing and when they do something it’s immoral.
— Allamagoosa (@Sillymagoosa) March 10, 2014
Racist. Misogynist. Homophobe. Bigot. #SaySomethingLiberalIn4Words
— Matthew Forney (@realmattforney) March 9, 2014
— Son of Texas (@The_Texas_Son) March 9, 2014
Continue to mock men for trying to deal with the issues they face, feminists. Just don’t then ask “where have all the good men gone?”
— Margery (The Woman) (@thewomanmargery) March 10, 2014
But we have to remember that not every liberal is a troll and a moron, just the twitteroffendi. One of the joys of living in a small town is working on projects with people you don’t like, and agreeing with people who politically oppose you, such as Lew.
@pukeko60 I can certainly agree that the best satire is unintentional; the second-best humourful.
— Lew (@LewSOS) March 10, 2014
Finally, I wish this was satire, but I am afraid it is the new green hell we are heading for.
Ohh..no drinking. Thanks for letting me know. I’ll grab an Evian instead. pic.twitter.com/lPrRehW3D6
— Ruslan Kogan (@ruslankogan) March 10, 2014
Although I use about half of the curricula given to my kids by the charter school – I DON’T use the literature provided. So we’ve gone from “what the … is that junk?” to reading classics. For any of your interested readers, the web is full of age-appropriate lists of classic books for your kids to read. And if you have electronic readers, much of it is free (or if you don’t like guggenheim non-formatting) exceedingly cheap. I paid $3 for “25 children’s books” – including Heidi, Black Beauty, Treasure Island… heck, that’s worth having on your ereader as an adult.
SF is definitely dying. If you go to the shelves (it’s my genre of choice. Dad got me hooked on Heinlein at a young age) all you see is Vampire/Werewolf/Witch Alt-Heroine Sexy Silly Stuff. Now I like a good alt-universe fantasy, I’ll even read a vampire/werewolf novel – but some of the most popular are impressively awful. Bad writing. Silly worlds. I have theories about this, but they’re off in woo-woo land, so I’ll spare your combox. And in the meantime, we have loads of time to vilify OSC – because he’s Mormon. -looks quizzical- Oh yes, let’s throw mud at someone who writes well, writes frequently, and has some morals. Why?
Meh. I’ll stick with my old battered paperbacks… if you like fantasy, can I suggest Elisabeth Moon’s Paks World series? She’s finishing it off this May.
The Generation before us? And still active?
Jerry Pournelle.
David Weber
Lois Bujold
Elizabeth Moon
Stepeh Lawhead
Orson Scott Card
All good for teens, as is Ursula Le Guin. However, my favourite writer of that era is Barry Hughart, who wrote three novels about Master Li and Number ten ox which are not for the kids at all. Think of a dirty minded Terry Pratchett running around ancient China.
My age? You have cyberpunk and MilSci.
Charles Stross has some good juvenalia. The Laundy series will cause nightmares, but is fun. His compatriots Ken McLeod and Ian Banks.
Neil Gaiman
Neal Stephenson
Sarah Hoyt (quite liberterian)
John Ringo has written some safe for kids books. But most of his stuff is for adults. All of Michael Z. Williamson’s stuff is good but the early stuff needed a lot of editing. Same with Tom Kratman. Larry — well I like the Monster Hunter Series but his other series I don’t get at all.
There are a couple of urban fantasy series that have been ruined by making the protagonists too powerful over time — involving a wizard in Chicago and some odd woman in St Louis.
Barry Hughart is out of print, all the others are available at the usual suspects. And the Librarian will say they are out, as she looks down at your lack of culture.
I’m glad the public library in Dunedin still has a good collection of the classics, – even if a lot of them are not actually on the shelves they’re on the database and will be brought up from downstairs if needed.
Though, they have been trying to modernise a lot, and now there is plenty of that crap you mention and a whole lot of losers taking advantage of the free internet to bum around on Facebook or Youtube or gambling websites.