Link Roundup! -The Toast

Oh, girl, I do NOT like this guy! Go with Captain Awkward (as a Professional Internet Person, I definitely understand both sides of this, and I try not to be weirded out when I meet a stranger who feels like they know me, because, well, they kind of do, but this is just giving me bad feelings):

My Twitter is open, it’s a mix of personal and professional stuff as I have developed a group of followers who are interested in my life. So it’s open for him to read. But as Doug keeps insisting, he has not got an account himself so it’s not like I am one of the folks he’s following. I find it creepy that he is reading everything I write there and commenting on it, that he calls me by my user name and the fact that he tells me about it makes me feel surveilled. He never ever comments on the professional stuff, which I would have found totally fine. It’s always the personal stuff and he always reinterprets it through this “poor little stressed lady” lens.

Trolling done right:

Once I was in charge of the group I decided to take it in a new direction. The Confederate flag, I felt, had become a toxic brand. And all this South-rising-again business was a sure loser with swing voters. A top-down rebranding was in order. After rigorous focus-group testing, I decided to align the group with LGBT rights, Michelle Obama, Judaism, miscegenation, and the victorious Juche ideology. And that is how “confederate pride, heritage not hate” became “LGBT Southerners for Michelle Obama and Judaism.”

no no no no no no no do not want fix your life get a real job cut your hair stay away from my daughter why are you making me voice such reactionary sentiments i resent you for it:

3:30 p.m. We do a college-radio-station show. There’s a cute girl working there. She’s in college, so that’s a little weird. But she’s definitely over 18, so it’s probably okay. Her name is Melinda. She is fair-skinned and somewhat “mushy,” almost like she hasn’t lost her baby weight yet, but in a hot way. We flirt a little and I invite her to the show. She says she’ll “try.”

Speaking of being a Professional Internet Person, do you use a Twitter blocklist/auto-blocker? I have one, and I DO notice that if a friend is tango-ing with a troll, the troll is usually already blocked from me, which makes it well worth the price of admission (zero dollars.) There are a few false positives, of course: I had a reader email me because she was blocked and couldn’t figure out why, so I looked at her timeline and merrily unblocked her. Anyway, the new thing trolls are doing is getting SO MAD they’re auto-blocked and claiming it violates their something something, which is silly, and I enjoy it greatly.

What I Learned Sending My Novel Out Under a Male Name:

I sent the six queries I had planned to send that day. Within 24 hours George had five responses—three manuscript requests and two warm rejections praising his exciting project. For contrast, under my own name, the same letter and pages sent 50 times had netted me a total of two manuscript requests. The responses gave me a little frisson of delight at being called “Mr.” and then I got mad. Three manuscript requests on a Saturday, not even during business hours! The judgments about my work that had seemed as solid as the walls of my house had turned out to be meaningless. My novel wasn’t the problem, it was me—Catherine.

I wanted to know more of how the Georges of the world live, so I sent more. Total data: George sent out 50 queries, and had his manuscript requested 17 times. He is eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book. Fully a third of the agents who saw his query wanted to see more, where my numbers never did shift from one in 25.

Today I have two good causes I would like to solicit your Good Vibes and Prayers and Money for! My dear friend has a friend who is a single mom with a sick baby, a combination of words that make me come unglued. And, if you remember our darling, sweet Toastie Ella telling us about her sick boyfriend, here is a great place to help if you are UK based! They are already raising LOADS of money for this worthy cause, not just for John, but for everybody with his condition. Ella is going to be writing about the whole thing for us, in her perfect and wonderful way, and my dream is for the final installment to be “John’s magically great now because a British Toastie was a perfect match, so I’m too busy having celebratory sex with him to write anything else, shove off.”

Also, again, what is DESPERATELY needed is more bone marrow donors (one of the rare times a charity truly needs YOU more than your money for a cause!) and my cheek swab could not have been an easier process!

garsnahrggdds:

Her own show was an instant hit online in 2011, and soon a number of networks and production companies expressed interest in adapting ‘‘Awkward Black Girl’’ for prime-time TV. To Rae’s disappointment, most wanted to completely rework the show. Rae recalls a phone conversation with a network executive who wanted to make it into a pan-racial franchise operation, starting with ‘‘Awkward Indian Boy.’’ Another suggested Rae recast the lead with a lighter-skinned actress with long, straight hair — in essence, the exact opposite of Rae. She turned down the offers.

‘‘They wanted to make it as broad as possible, broadly niche, but I was like: No, that’s not what this is about,’’ she says. Another botched opportunity came in the summer of 2012 with Shonda Rhimes and Rhimes’s production partner, Betsy Beers. Rae pitched them a show called ‘‘I Hate L.A. Dudes,’’ a comedy about a woman trying to date preening, image-obsessed men in Hollywood. Rhimes and Beers loved it so much that they sold it to ABC. But Rae had trouble getting the script ready for pilot-reading season that winter. She recalls fielding constant, sometimes overlapping and contradictory notes from the network and Rhimes’s team. (Rhimes declined to be interviewed for this story.) In the end, her treatment fell short of expectations, and the pilot wasn’t picked up. ‘‘I compromised my vision, and it didn’t end up the show that I wanted,’’ she says. ‘‘It wasn’t funny anymore.’’

I just hired a sixty-something husband-and-wife team to do a one-time massive deep clean of my house (baseboards! fridge! stove! the chandelier made of fake antlers! the weird reindeer head above the mantelpiece! the little circular worms that wander eight feet into the house twice a year by the hundreds and then die!), and they came out yesterday to scope the joint, and they are killing me, literally killing me, because they are SO nice, and SO heavily LDS (dropped a reference to the temple, had super-obvious garment lines under their clothes), and they are so! passionate! about! cleaning! and also sort of amazingly gossipy? Like, they’ll drop client names, and they’ll tell stories, but they won’t tell a story CONNECTED to a client name. So, I’ll get something like “some of these big houses…I won’t say WHO, but let’s just say that one of the Utah Jazz players had a jetted tub that was black on the bottom, and they had a live-in gal, and they told me she doesn’t ‘do’ tubs, and I wanted to say ‘well, darlin’, what do you do?”

So, TL;DR, there is a devout pillar of the faith wearing a backpack vacuum like a Ghostbuster and standing on a terrifying ladder scrubbing out my light fixtures while dispensing folksy grandparent wisdom, and I want him to live here forever now.

UPDATE: he took all the shelves out of my fridge and washed them and then organized my fridge (yes, I have a lot of dairy products)