Tuesday, January 1, 2013

NEWS: giveaways bonanza, new layout, bad boys & bad sex

source: cheezburger.com
Giveaways Bonanza

Happy 2013! To celebrate, many blogs are hosting giveaways. Many blogs. Enter at Cuddlebuggery's and then scroll to the end of the post to enter 35 others. Enter Book Sake's and then click here for their hop event to enter 194 others. Finally, enter a big one at Book Haven Extraordinaire. (These are mostly YA-focused book blogs, btw.)

Protip: Have at least one account either on Google, Twitter, and Facebook. Twitter preferably because you can tweet about the giveaway and follow the reviewer — that's two entries there.

Protip #2:  Use the best computer with the fastest internet connection you have access to. Some of the blogs have a lot of bling-bling making the website slow to load.

Last but certainly not least, visit Kara's blog to win the Shift trilogy, a YA series by M.R. Merrick.


New Layout!

Speaking of blogs that load slow, look at my new layout! Compared to my previous layout, it should be more readable, prettier and — most important of all — still load as fast if not faster. There are a few free services to test how fast your website load, but the one I googled yesterday, Pingdom Tools, was the most helpful.

Check out the footer, the bottom bar at the end of the webpage, to see what made the new layout possible. A big thank you to all those bloggers who blog about making your blog better.

Also, the About and Review Policy pages have been updated, and the tags have been re-organized. Now the tags have only reviews, news, x-stars, and genres with the latter being the stuffing.


Bad Boys & Bad Sex

# American Library Association to Little Kids: Women Are Second Best (2012 January 30)
"For decades the American Library Association has had a dismal record of honoring female artists with its Caldecott medal, given each year to 'the most distinguished American picture book for children.' That record just got worse."
Old-reported news, yes but it's still current.

# When bad boys are just plain bad. (2012 December 17)
"But whereas the classic bad boy allows women to escape from patriarchal control, new bad boys – abusers – reinforce it."
Ms Foz Meadows being her BAMF-self again, rocking readers with her intelligent perspective of popular literature.

# Sex and Sexual Violence (2012 December 29)
"When so many sexual encounters in fiction are negative, violent, coerced, or frightening because that is seen as 'proper' narrative tension, it is doubly important to depict positive sexual encounters as part and parcel of an exciting tale."
I see the word "positive sexual encounters" and I immediately thought of the NA mm-romance Making Ends Meet. I should go re-read it.

# Why is there so much slut shaming in novels written by women? (2013 January 1)
"A woman’s worth in romance novels is often measured by their sexual behavior."
Oh, double standard. How you sabotage society.


Picture of the Day, via Veela-Valoom.


Oh the Twi-shame, Rob Pattison.

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