We Need to Talk About Simon

March 18, 2018 Emily

Over the summer, Mary and I read Becky Albertalli's The Upside of Unrequited for our Summer YA Book Club. If you didn't read our blog post about this novel or don't recall what we said, we both loved it, and we both said we really needed to get around to reading her first novel Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda one of these days.

So now picture me at the beginning of this week, Monday, March 12. It's nearly a year later, and Simon has been sitting on my shelf just waiting for me to make time for him, and the film version of the novel Love, Simon is set to hit theaters THIS COMING WEEKEND. So I do what any responsible grad student would do. I shirk all responsibilities, brew a cup of tea, snuggle into the couch with my cat and my Pua stuffed animal, and I read this book.

Dear reader, I could not put it down. I finished it in one sitting. And now that I've read the book and seen the movie adaptation, I need to talk about it.

ANTM Recap - C24/E10: Beauty is Real

March 16, 2018 Susan

source (41).gif — It’s the best episode of the cycle

(besides makeovers – ahem – Tyovers): GO SEES!

Selfie Mail from Tyra says they’re gonna “take a walk in the real world” and everyone’s just like “thank god we get out of this house.”

Featured Bookstore: Little Shop of Stories, Decatur, GA

March 14, 2018 Emily

Local independent bookstores

help foster a sense of community, and that's what drew me to Little Shop of Stories in Decatur, Georgia.

The first time I walked through their doors during the Decatur Book Festival many years ago, I could see that this bookstore was doing more than selling Children's and Young Adult books. They were promoting a literary community in Decatur for children, adults, and even dogs (more on the dogs later). Little Shop of Stories is the type of bookstore that I walk into knowing I'm going to end up finding at least one or two things I have to buy. It's the type of place I recommend to friends whenever they're visiting from out of town and looking for something fun to do. Because, as corny as this might sound, it's more than a bookstore. It's a fun place to be.

This past weekend while I was in Atlanta visiting friends and family, I had an opportunity to sit down with Justin Colussy-Estes to talk more about Little Shop of Stories, what makes this store so awesome, and its connection to the Decatur community.

The Official #BSG Guide to the 2018 Oscars

February 25, 2018 Kelli

I will readily admit that I am one of those people who loves to watch the Oscars almost as much as I love to talk trash about the Oscars. I’ve heard many like-minded people equate the Oscars to “the Super Bowl for movies,” and after some thought, I can pretty much get on-board with this comparison. Sure, there are some huge differences — the Super Bowl is an event where teams are playing live to win something they actually deserve, whereas the Oscars are an arbitrary set of awards determined by a bunch of rich old white people — but when it comes to the excitement of the viewing experience, the amount of alcohol consumed throughout the ceremony, and the excessive pettiness of my Twitter timeline during the show and in the days to follow, I honestly can’t think of two more similar events.

A week from tonight, the 90th Annual Academy Awards ceremony will air on ABC. Despite the fact that I’ve watched the Oscars every year for as long as I can remember, this will be the first time I officially make my predictions in a public forum (and what could be more public than this, our extremely famous and well-known blog?). I want to do my best to be correct, but I also want to give some love to the films I actually liked, so I’m going to format this post the way a lot of writers do: for each category, I’ll give my official prediction, and then I’ll give the film that would win it if were up to me.

This intro is starting to run about as long as I expect Jimmy Kimmel’s opening monologue will, so let’s get into it, shall we?

Olly-Olly-Oxenfree: Narrative Games and Growth

February 6, 2018 Mary

Oxenfree, a 2016 game by Night School Studio, released to positive reviews, but quiet fandom about a year ago. I played the game when it first came out, and loved it, but I’ve recently picked it up again on the Nintendo Switch. A year is a considerable amount of time in some ways. Since I first played this game I’ve finished my comprehensive exam, immersed myself in my dissertation, moved, got a new cat, had some personal life changes, etc. etc.. The game feels different now in a way that’s hard to explain, but for this post I’m going to try to.

Late to the Game: Horizon Zero Dawn

February 6, 2018 Mary

To continue the trend of me not getting into games until they’ve been out for a year or so, I’ve been playing Horizon Zero Dawn, Guerrilla Games’s adventure for the PS4 that follows Aloy, a young woman tasked with discovering why the dangerous machines near her home are going crazy and murdering people. When I looked into what this game was about, I felt sold immediately. It has everything I like: a strong female protagonist, robot animals, beautiful settings, and lots and lots of sidequests. The A.V. Club’s Clayton Purdom calls Horizon Zero Dawn a “map game,” which isn’t completely fair. Yes, it’s a game where the player is invited to explore a map and complete quests in different areas of the map, but it also does a good job of building a complex world full of robots and intricate social hierarchies.

Complexity & Consent: A Re-examination of Master of None's Francesca

February 3, 2018 Kelli

master-of-none-tackles-the-friend-zone-entity-1320x720_orig.png

Of all the sexual misconduct stories that have come out of Hollywood since the Weinstein debacle, I think I speak for a lot of people when I say that I was most disappointed to read about Aziz Ansari. It’s not just because I think he’s funny and I like his work — it’s because he is a person who has consistently presented himself as an ally to women. He has repeatedly self-identified as a feminist, and he doesn’t just talk the talk; with his success, he’s certainly done his part to boost the careers and voices of the women around him.

Ansari’s willingness to help women tell their stories is a huge part of what makes his alleged behavior so surprising and frustrating. It feels like a personal betrayal to so many of us who have loved his work, who’ve been following and rooting for him all along the way because he’s one of the few male voices we felt we could trust to tell our stories as well as his own. If we can’t trust someone like Aziz to understand consent in its complexity, the road ahead of us is even more difficult than we thought.

(Spoilers for Master of None after the cut.)

Featured Bookstore: Greenlight, Brooklyn, NY

January 16, 2018 Kelli

It goes without saying that New York has a lot of bookstores.

Living here, I stumble across bookstores I’ve never seen before on a regular basis — and in an age where many people seem convinced that print has gone out of style, that’s a pretty magical feeling.

For the past few months, we’ve been featuring different bookstores in the spirit of encouraging people to shop local. Even with such a vast array of options where I live, I immediately knew what my first pick would be. Greenlight Bookstore has been one of my favorites since I moved here; it’s one of those places I simply can’t walk past without taking a look inside, no matter how recently I’ve been. Maybe it’s the enticement of the books on display in the windows, the quaint green awning over the entrance, or the glow of the hanging circular lights inside, but this place lures me in like it’s the flame and I’m the out-of-control moth who has absolutely no business spending any more of her money on books.

I, Tonya: The Unlikely Biopic that Won My Heart

January 4, 2018 Kelli

In January of 1994, figure skater Nancy Kerrigan was infamously attacked and injured following a practice session at the U.S. Figure Skating Championship. It was later revealed that the attacker, a man named Shane Stant, was hired by co-conspirators of Kerrigan’s main team competitor, Tonya Harding, with the intent to break Kerrigan’s leg so that she would not be able to compete at that year’s Winter Olympics.

I was three years old in 1994. Growing up, I only knew about the incident in the vaguest of terms, my understanding being that at some point in the early 1990s, one female figure skater attacked another in an attempt to ruin her career. I didn’t know anything about these women, only that one of them was good, and one of them was bad. This is the version of Tonya Harding that history paints: she was a crude, aggressive, and ultimately vindictive woman who did unspeakable things to get ahead. She was the closest thing competitive figure skating had to a villain.

When I was home for the holidays last month, my mom and I saw a trailer for I, Tonya, Craig Gillespie’s biopic chronicling Tonya Harding’s life. “I don’t know why anyone would want to watch a movie about that,” my mom said. “I was watching when that happened. The sound of Nancy Kerrigan crying — it was so horrible. I can still hear it.”

Here’s the thing: I, Tonya isn’t about “that.” It’s not about the attack on Nancy Kerrigan, an event which solidified Harding’s reputation as the bad girl of figure skating and ultimately ended her career. No — this film is a biopic in the most traditional sense, no matter how untraditional its methods may be. This is a film about Tonya Harding.

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