Poor Mojo's Newswire

...being on the site was very flattering, and gave us (or at least me!) a sense of being part of a valuable institution and history. I’m not actually a long time reader of the Journal — I doubt I ever seriously read an issue until they started publishing me — and Gary, Kim, etc. were never big influences or models for me as I know they have been for many. But I still respect what the Journal has been, and have enjoyed many of the things I’ve read in it, and I was honored to have been a part of it. So that’s the good. On to the bad! That bad being that tcj.com has been a clusterfuck from the get go. Except “clusterfuck” is kind of too active. More a somnofutz, maybe. ... It wasn’t infrequent for 4 of the 10 posts visible on the front page to be HU links. It was rare that there were fewer than 3; maybe we got down to 2 once or twice in those last weeks when the Panelists started posting regularly. ... I figured that the content of HU would be clearly separated from the content of tcj.com. That, as it turns out, was not the case. Instead, HU content went into the same long blog roll as everything else, visually indistinguishable. As a result, in a lot of ways, HU and tcj.com merged. Which meant I was effectively editing big chunks of tcj.com. Sean Collins expressed his heartfelt horror at this state of affairs. The thing is…I agree with this. ...

This book contains fifteen pages of story, followed by eight pages of pin-ups of Sarah Palin. If you actually felt a little sick start to crawl up the back of your throat when your first saw that, I can guarantee you weren't the only one. And yes, they're not kidding around with the pin-ups. But I will spare you that horror. For the moment. ... And while I'm willing to believe this book when it tells me it's trying to depict Sarah Palin, my response to the idea that it can be characterized as steampunk is more along the lines of "Hold on there." Although to be fair to the book, Steampunk Palin defies classification into any literary genre, unless there's a genre I'm unaware of simply called "WTF?!?"