In protest at Amazon’s new “adult” policy

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We the undersigned, state our strong objection to Amazon’s “Adult” policy as outlined in their letter in italics below

“In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Ashlyn D
Member Services
Amazon.com Advantage

We find it hypocritical that Amazon continues to sell adult books but thinks that removing the sales rating to (keep them out of the public eye) will achieve this.

We would like to hear the rationalisation for allowing sales ratings for explicit books with a heterosexual focus such as:

–Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds by Chronicle Books (pictures of over 600 naked women)
–Rosemary Rogers’ Sweet Savage Love” (explicit heterosexual romance);
–Kathleen Woodiwiss’ The Wolf and the Dove (explicit heterosexual romance);
–Bertrice Smal’s Skye o’Malley which are all explicit heterosexual romances
–and Alan Moore’s Lost Girls (which is a very explicit sexual graphic novel)

Yet the following books, which have a gay or lesbian focus, have been classed as “adult books” and stripped of their sales ratings:

–Radclyffe Hill’s classic novel about lesbians in Victorian times, The Well of Loneliness, and which contains not one sentence of sexual description;
–Mark R Probst’s YA novel The Filly about a young man in the wild West discovering that he’s gay (gay romance, no sex);
–Charlie Cochrane’s Lessons in Love (gay romance with no sex);
–The Dictionary of Homophobia: A Global History of Gay & Lesbian Experience, edited by Louis-George Tin (non-fiction, history and social issues);
–and Homophobia: A History by Bryan Fone (non-fiction, focus on history and the forms prejudice against homosexuality has taken over the years).

Please tell us, Amazon, why the explicit books with a heterosexual focus are allowed to keep their sales ratings while the non-explicit romances, the histories and the biographies that deal with LGBTQ issues are not.

We would love to hear your reasoning.

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Some of the comments by people who signed are pretty illuminating about the issues with the new policy, I think:

Surely there is a way to establish a “safe search” for viewers who don’t want to hear about adult books, that doesn’t strip those books of their rankings. I also find it appalling that many non-explicit GLBT titles have been targeted for ranking removal. By all means allow people to customize their search experience, but don’t penalize readers & writers of GLBT and erotica simply for their preferences. And don’t classify something as “adult” merely because it acknowledges that not everyone is heterosexual. You aren’t protecting your viewers; you’re imposing your morality on them.

I’m pretty sure if you’re doing something “in consideration of [your] entire customer base” you shouldn’t discriminate against a large portion of that base. Also, you might consider making sure this is something your customer base actually wants before making the decision for them. At the very least, you should make this an opt-out option.

Mine was a little shorter, since I think other people had put it better than I: If you’re going to state that something is your goal, make sure that your methodology has some sort of rational relationship with your rationale.

Smart Bitches and others are lashing out at amazon as well, in some pretty clever ways. NB: Amazon Rank.

I still have to do tomorrow’s reading and I should really get started on my oral argument preparation and the contract that’s due soon, to say nothing of all the outlining I should be doing… all aside from the “optional” stuff like working on my novel, keeping up to date on social obligations like working on critiques, etc.

But since this is the first time I’ve completed a major writing assignment on time this semester without having to cut class, I’m kind of excited.

I haven’t read LIVING WITH GHOSTS or IMAGER yet, but of the other three books I got from the Library, only UNFALLEN DEAD really impressed me. The others weren’t bad, but they weren’t really stellar either. I don’t think I’d bother to buy the others in the series, though of course I already own NIGHTLIFE, the first book in Thurman’s series. I’m a bit tempted to donate it to the library, honestly. It’s not a bad book, but they can use it better than me.

On Friday, I went by B&N like I always do before Chilis for dinner. I picked up their very last copy of Ilona Andrew’s MAGIC STRIKES (I had to make the poor customer service guy go root around in the back for it, too). While I was waiting, I saw Jaye Well’s RED-HEADED STEPCHILD just sitting on the customer service desk, asked if I could take it, and they said sure. So I got it too (I don’t remember how I found out about it, but I read the first three chapters on B&N’s website and liked it. It’s not a super awesome book but it’s a solid read with a UF protagonist who is neither whorey nor super overconfident, which was nice). As I was leaving, much to my surprise, the new Cassie Palmer book, CURSE THE DAWN by Karen Chance was already on the shelves, even though it’s not due out until the 7th. So I went back to Customer Service, made sure I wouldn’t get them into trouble by buying it early, then when they said they were allowed to put it out before the due date, asked if they also had TURN COAT avaialble early…

Unfortunately, they couldn’t help me with that.

MAGIC STRIKES was definitely the best of the bunch. I was afraid that most of the hype around the book wasn’t justified, because I own the other books in the series and they weren’t worldshatteringly awesome, but I have to say I was impressed by Andrews’ improvement. Not that she was a bad writer before, but she’s gotten miles more awesome. I love everything about MAGIC STRIKES and there were moment where I put the book down and laughed hysterically for whole minutes. (Notably the whole scene where Kate, Curran and Dali look and Jim and go What, we didn’t mean to make it look so easy.) Great book and I can’t wait for the big showdown with Roland.

Unfortunately, I shouldn’t have used up so much time this week reading, and I won’t be able to get to IMAGER or LIVING WITH GHOSTS, because my to-do list is looking a little scary.

* Appellate Brief, due Monday
* Rent Court write-up, due Monday
* Property Reading, due Monday
* Con Law reading, due Monday
* Oral Argument prep, due Tuesday
* Employment Contract, due Thursday
* Tower of Nine work
* Lithmeria work
* Veiled Secrets & Dark Pretenses posts
…etc

Monday’s meeting with my writing group went pretty well, although one of the girls didn’t have a piece ready and the other girl’s was a look into God and his therapist, which for whatever reason didn’t do much for me, though I think conceptually it was probably a good idea. They told me that my second scene for Tower of Nine was better than my first and suggested that I tweak it so that I start out on the second scene and give the important elements of the first scene in other ways, but I’m reluctant to do that because I don’t like the idea of a book starting on the note of a character waking up.

Before the meeting, I picked up David Weber’s new book, Storm from the Shadows, which was told from the perspective of Michele Henke, Honor Harrington (his main character in the series) ’s best friend and a close cousin of the Queen. I read it after the meeting, and it was pretty good. It begins at the battle in which she is captured and going through her release and stationing in a recently-acquired star system where she is poised to gain command of a fleet. The book was interesting, but for me, my main reaction was that Henke’s command style, which is good but in my opinion uninspired, is so very different from Honor’s, which makes her a much less engaging character. It was interesting to see the different situations across the Honorverse, but truthfully, Henke is not one of the more engaging characters of the series — the characters from the subseries based around Honor’s students (Shadow of Saganami), or around the newly independent Torch plant (Crown of Slaves), all have much more readable characters who are very sympathetic, and Henke, who I do like as a character, just wasn’t as good a perspective as some of the other side characters have been. Which makes me glad I checked it out from the library instead of buying it.

Although I am looking forward to the next book in the Honorverse, which Storm from the Shadows set up very nicely.

I think one of the things I really disliked about the latest Honorverse books, truthfully, is that it annoys me when I as a reader know that the characters are barking up the wrong tree, or are being duped. When I read a scene from the bad guy’s perspective and then the good guys fall for the trap, it just makes me want to skip stuff until there’s something that doesn’t fill me with dread and frustration to read, but rather inspiration and a good feeling about the characters’ cleverness.

St. Patrick’s day was fun, though I didn’t drink much. I watched the new Punisher movie at a friend of a friend’s place (it was so awful it doesn’t even bear explaining), then we went to the bar. Saw some people I haven’t seen in a long time and had a lovely conversation with the girlfriend of one of my oldest friends. I really like her, which is good. Around midnight a guy I went to high school with showed up, which was a little awkward for me - last year around this time, I puked in his car, and I haven’t seen him since… - but we got along alright, and at close we went back to my friend’s house because one of the guys was too drunk to drive home with any degree of safety, esp. since he didn’t live close by. I’d had one beer around 10pm and one around midnight, so by 2am I was pretty much fine, but I went to keep company and hang out.

I got home around 5am, so tired I didn’t make it up the steps and just decided to crash on the couch.

Wednesday and Thursday I pretty much… slept. Then Friday my friend and I went to this awesome Thai place that I saw on the Food Network. It’s called Thai Basil and the woman who runs it was in one of the throwdowns with Bobby Flay, over her Pad Thai. I hate that particular dish, but I’m a huge curry fan and it’s hard to find yellow curry chicken in Baltimore, and my friend likes Asian food. So we went there, then to justify the trip, we checked out the Smithsonian in DC.

We didn’t get there until around 3:30 (the original plan had been to go to the museums first and then eat dinner at Thai Basil) and we didn’t realize that the Smithsonians close at 5:30, which is the most ridiculous time to close down anything touristy in DC ever, because OH GOD THE TRAFFIC.

After that we went to see Duplicity, which, while decent, mostly reminded me of a weird mix of old-school Bond and Mr. & Mrs. Smith.

Oh, and I won first place for last week’s writing prompt over at the prose_challenge group.

She subtly adjusts her posture and beckons toward the waitress, who does not seem perturbed that she missed Emily’s entrance.

Now, personally, I think that maybe it’s a little wordy, and it’s probably a little pretentious. And if we want to get technical, present tense isn’t the most popular for proper technical writing, and I’ve given MS Word permission to tell me when there are things in my document that maybe ain’t proper for an academic paper. I find it helpful when it underlines contractions in that helpful blue color, because my law professors find it irksome when I’m that informal.

But honest to God, Word is convinced that “waitress,” of all things, just ain’t grammatically correct. It insists that I change it to “server,” or preferably “waiter.” I guess its PC little brain wants me to be gender neutral. Except waiter isn’t gender neutral*, and server is a synonym, not a grammatically correct version of the term I chose.

What really baffles me, though, is that it has no problem if I replace “waitress” with “barmaid,” which is at least as sexist (actually it’s probably more sexist, considering that what barmaids put up with is a lot worse than what waitress have to handle, and the innate connotations that “maid” has as opposed to just the feminine ending of “ess”) and actually does come ready-made with a gender-neutral term that matches the word: bartender (which usually, where I’m from, does indicate a male, but its not as blatantly gendered as “waiter” for whatever reason).

I think what really bothers me, though, is that the underline isn’t the nifty blue of “you probably would sound more proper if…” but rather the hideous green of “you eff’d up your grammar there, pretty lady.”

_{* Some people seem to think that “waiter is the word and waitress is the female version of the gender neutral.” This is crap. Waiter is not gender neutral. It’s just that the “male” version of a lot of words is considered to apply to both in a case where you’re trying to be inclusive. There is no such thing as a gender neutral word where the “other version” is only one gender. At best, that’s a myth that the culture likes to propagate to pretend that it’s not sexist at its base.}

The grandson is in jail for attempted murder and his grandmother is at the emergency room.

I caught the tail end of the Castle premiere on ABC. I’m going to have to remember to watch it on Saturday when it re-airs. I can’t believe I forgot about it

• Edit another chapter of Tower of Nine
• Write the next scene of Tower of Nine
• Finish the His Father’s Gift short story
• Work in Monday’s homework
• Work on the Appellate Brief rough draft
• Build more rooms for the Char
• Add/join more fanlistings
• Finish something creative in Lusteria

I guess I should note that I picked up The Shadow Queen by Anne Bishop today at Barnes & Noble. I cried the whole way through — it’s not a sad book, but I tend to tear up during inspirational scenes and stuff where a character is super honorable and awesome, and this book had a lot of that.

I posted the first half of a short story / flash fiction thing about the Shield who saves Vivian at the beginning of Tower of Nine over at deviantART. So far, the response has been positive.

We got this e-mail this morning:

I want to reiterate what is stated in the syllabus. Whether using laptop computers or not, students are expected to be fully prepared and to follow class discussion. If a student using a laptop responds to a question by saying, “Would you repeat the question?’ I will assume that computer use has distracted that student and will consider him or her as on call for the remainder of the class.

In addition, I have become concerned enough about the nature of class discussion that I am going to announce periods in class when students will be required to close their computers and listen to their fellow students.

Now, as far as I’m concerned, I’m way more likely to be listening than taking notes in Constitutional Law, because the way he teaches it’s so hard to take notes. He likes to tell stories, and discuss things, and do a lot of “What if?”s that are more about stimulating your brain and teaching you how to think, than about giving you information that you need to regurgitate. So the idea of me being focused on my laptop instead of him… it’s unlikely to happen. Though in other classes, yeah, sometimes I stop paying 100% attention, so that I can make sure that I’m getting the notes down right.

But what he’s actually upset about is a student yesterday who got called on, asked him to repeat the question, and then repeatedly responded with “let me look through my notes…” — so I’m pretty sure the problem was less that he wasn’t paying attention and more that he hadn’t read the material for that day (which boggles the mind since Monday we had a snow day, so he had plenty of time to catch up). Or he’d read it, forgotten about it, and zoned out during one of the stories.

Regardless, I love how this teacher responds to an incident like that. “If you demonstrate that you aren’t paying attention and don’t know what you’re talking about, I will target you mercilessly throughout class.” — I’m not even sure if I’m being sarcastic or not. On the one hand, it’s unlikely that someone will be caught uninformed again, after an experience like that, but on the other it’s kind of a waste of time for the rest of us, who do know what’s going on and were sort of hoping to get some kind of meaningful discussion out of the day.

Sigh. I don’t claim that I always put 100% effort into all of my homework, but I at least try to come to class with some inkling of what’s going on, and when I’m there I very rarely zone out.

So I grumbled a bit, and I started my car very early, and dug up my gloves so that I wouldn’t freeze, and drove the half-hour to get to school. I left the house around 8:45 probably, because the free parking on the bridge by school becomes available at 9am. It’s a half hour drive, but I figured with the snow and late opening, the spots wouldn’t be snapped up quite as fast as usual.

So I get to school around 9:15 — 45 minutes before classes begin, and walk toward the building. In the road, because the sidewalk is a deathtrap. I learned that lesson the last time it snowed. So I get outside of the entrance, and see a classmate on the phone.

Telling his wife that the school changed its mind and that there’s a sign on the (locked) door announcing that school is closed for the day after all.

It’s worth noting that when I got home and checked my e-mail, the “we changed our minds, sorry!” e-mail had arrived in my inbox at 8:37. Admittedly, that’s a little less than an hour and a half before the school opened, but some students (and teachers!) are commuting from DC, or like to arrive early and get some studying done; for comparison, the e-mail saying “classes starting at 10 and after are on!” was sent more like at 4am.

You could say that I was irritated. Especially considering how much gas I wasted heating up the car because of all of the freaking ice.

Since I was already out, I called my brother to see if he was free today. He has the flu.

I stopped at Old Navy to see if they had any more size 10 long flare jeans, since they’re among the only jeans sold that fit me… but they were out. I bought the boot cut ones, we’ll see how that goes.

At least I picked up the new Kim Harrison book, White Witch, Black Charm, which was pretty good. I read half of it at Chili’s and the other half at home. It didn’t rock my world, but it was a solid read, and I’m happy to see that Rachel is maturing.

Admittedly many states have such a right in their state constitutions, but the supreme court wouldn’t enforce the 5th amendment against a state that doesn’t have such a rule. It wasn’t until around the 1960s, I think, that the criminal procedure stuff in the Bill of Rights was deemed binding on the states. And some of it still isn’t, like a right to a jury trial in a case involving more than $20.

For instance, in Maryland, I think you have to have at least $10k in controversy.

The right to counsel, however, is and I believe always was enforceable at the federal level upon state courts.

Weird.