I’m still trying to wrap my head around the first and surely there will be takes elsewhere in the media, so let’s focus on the latter.

• It was a tough 2019 for Erika Moen and Matthew Nolan; they worked up two books for print, and Moen had a well-documented (and damn brave of her to do so) intensive treatment for her mental illness. So starting in late December, they turned Oh Joy, Sex Toy over to guest strips for six weeks, to give themselves a break.

  Yesterday, they returned, and with the absolute happiest strip I’ve ever seen them collaborate on, and they do a comic all about ways to bring people to orgasm. Take a look at the panel I tweeted yesterday and tell me it’s coming from a place other than pure, contented happiness¹. Welcome back, Matt and Erika, and glad to see the break² did you some good.

• Also taking a break for about the same block of time, Yuko Ota and Ananth Hirsh, who put Barbarous on pause to get caught up on other projects. The first three or so chapters of Barbarous were a measured introduction to the characters, always showing rather than telling³.

  Chapter four started to really build in the possible conflicts that the outside world might bring to Percy and Leeds, and chapter five got us back into the swing of things after a lengthy hiatus, dropping us into the middle of a magical attack from an thus-far unknown adversary. Things are speeding up and now is the ideal time to get caught up if you weren’t.

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¹ In this case, from having a squeaky-clean butthole.

² Or at least a bidet attachment.

³ Not only are the pair masterful storytellers, Ota’s one of the best character and costume designers in comics; nobody pays as much attention to how clothes accent a character except Kosuke Fujishima.

Jim Ottaviani and Maris Wicks may be the most potent combination in nonfiction comics. How else to explain how they can spin such engagement and — dare I say it? — suspense from events past and in the public eye? They took the recent history of the three women who lived among Primates, and now they’re looking at the history of women in space in Astronauts, a copy of which was provided by :01 Books; pretty much everything in the book is available to anybody with access to interlibrary loan, but let’s tag this with spoilers, ahoy anyway.

Compared to Primates, Ottaviani and Wicks take a different approach this time around; last time they partnered, the book was told by an omniscient narrator, observing what Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas did in their research on chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans (respectively). In Astronauts, the bulk of the story is told as remeniscences of its central subject, Mary Cleave, with forays into the experiences of other women who came before her.

In case you don’t recognize her name, Dr Cleave (biologist, ecologist, environmental engineer, and pilot from the age of 14) was a member of the 9th NASA astronaut group — the second recruited following efforts by Nichelle Nichols to broaden the pool of applicants beyond white guy test pilots — and really only applied because being an astronaut meant you had to qualify as a jet pilot and she always wanted to fly a plane with an afterburner. She twice flew into space on Atlantis, specialized in the operation of the shuttle’s robotic arm, and was instrumental in working out the design and operation of the NASA space toilet. After retiring from flight status, she served as head of NASA’s Science Mission Directorate.

And in telling her story, she tells the story of Valentina Tereshkova, of the thirteen women who passed every test that Mercury Seven did but weren’t allowed to join the astronaut corps, of the designers that made the Shuttle, of the astronaut one class in front of her that had the weight and eyes of the world on her as NASA’s first woman in space.

Oh, and she tells about how it took NASA 23 missions before they figured out that zero-G crumbs from sandwiches could be avoided by using tortillas, thanks to fellow STS-61-B rookie Rodolfo Neri Vela’s meal preferences. Sometimes the obvious answers aren’t obvious until you let somebody with a different background into your club, y’know?

Mary Cleave may not be the most famous astronaut you’ve ever heard of, but Ottaviani and Wicks found maybe the most typical member of the NASA astronaut program — whip smart, widely experienced, endlessly curious, problem solvers, people who maybe didn’t set out to be astronauts but wound up there because they had the skills to get there¹.

Being born in 1947, Cleave’s lifetime parallels that of crewed spaceflight; she was solo piloting about the time that Yuri Gagarin took the first human spaceflight. She was just about the same age at the time of her astronaut selection that Neil Armstrong was at his. She helped make the Shuttle workable for extended missions, and her first flight helped work out the construction techniques that would be used to build the International Space Station. She was instrumental in diverting Eileen Collins away from a career as a Mission Specialist and towards that of Pilot and Commander. Like I said, typical.

Astronauts is bookended with the idea of what an astronaut looks like, starting with a floating figure doffing the pressurized launch suit and only revealing Cleave on page two, and ending with pages of photos: Tereshkova, Ride, and Cleave, their cartoon representations next to their pictures.

This is followed by a two page spread of people whose faces we should know — Guion Bluford, Ellison Onizuka, Mae Jemison, Sunita Williams, Leland Melvin, Chris Hadfield, and more². It’s perfectly synced with the message of the book, and if, like me, you’ve spent your life looking up at those explorers that have left the bounds of Earth, it’s likely to inspire a tear or two.

We, as a species, made it to space, to the moon, to semi-permanent residence in orbit, because of women. We’re going back to the moon, and we’re not forgetting half of humanity this time. We’ll be going further in the future and that will require astronauts, who can no longer be picked from less than 6% of the planet’s population. Ottaviani and Wicks want you to remember that, and wants everybody reading Astronauts to ask themselves one question: What do you want to be?

Astronauts, by Jim Ottaviani (words) and Maris Wicks (pictures) is available at your local bookstore or comic shop starting today. It doesn’t shy away from the fact that we’ve lost astronauts, and you may need to explain about Apollo 1, Challenger, and Columbia; assuming that’s not a problem, it’s an ideal read for any wannabe astronauts or space enthusiasts with the patience to get through 160 pages.

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¹ Or, as Cleave put it, I got my first job at NASA because I could fix the toilet.

² There are three photos that I didn’t recognize, and while I get the point Wicks and Ottaviani are making — astronauts can look like anybody — my only wish for the book is that might have included a key to the astronauts on those nearly-final pages.

Well, last week certainly sucked, but I’m back in the swing of things, and eager to talk about some books with you. First up: Go With The Flow by Lily Williams (words and pictures) and Karen Schneemann (also words). A review copy — that is, an advanced, not-final-version-of-the-book review copy, so your reading experience may be slightly different than mine — was sent by the fine folks at :01 Books a few weeks back, just as release day was happening. I took the unusual step of waiting to write this review until I could discuss the book with somebody else (more on that in a moment), so for once what you’ll read here is not based solely on my reading and interpretation. Oh, and spoilers ahead.

This is a book about periods; having never had one, I talked with my wife at some length about her experience with the topic, through the lens of several dozen years of having periods, to be sure that I wasn’t missing anything important. She assures me that GWTF gets it right, particularly its emphasis on the fact that no two period-havers¹ experience menstruation the same way. The framing story — high school, friends, mean girls, jerk bros, institutional sexism, screwing up and apologizing, crushes, and the rest of what it means to be a teen — provides a structure to hang the information on, without anything seeming preachy or lecturey.

Except for when it’s meant to. To the extent that there’s a single POV character in the circle of four besties, it’s Abby, the artsy, headstrong who sees something wrong and wants to do something about it. She’s joined by Brit (literary, reserved), Christine (blunt and sometimes inappropriate to hide her capital-F Feelings), and Sasha (new in school, picked on by the Mean Girls)². They’re all mad that period supplies are rarely stocked in the bathrooms (and when they are, they cost money³), but it’s Abby that cajoles (and sometimes browbeats) the others into her protests and letter-writing.

Abby’s assumptions that her friends feel about things as strongly as she does precipitates the big conflict moment in the story, and puts those friendships at risk. This part read particularly true, because we all ow that as teens, we don’t think through the consequences of our actions on those we care most about — oh, and she gets in trouble with Principal Condescending, too.

The crux of the story isn’t defeating institutional sexism — or even the localized, petty kind — but rather finding a way past that screw up. The fact that Abby’s Big Moment Of Protest resulted in positive notoriety and funding for period supplies throughout the district is less important than the fact that she grew as a person (not the mention the fact that she shouldn’t have had to go crowdfunding in the the first place).

And although Abby’s campaign for period justice forms the central plotline of the book, all four characters get their own time in the spotlight. Sasha adjusts to the new school with the help of her friends, and has the most typical social experience of sophomore year — first relationship, first experience with dating, etc. Brit deals with endometriosis and the time it keeps her from school, but is lucky enough to have supportive parents (at least one of whom is a doctor) and treatment by a specialist that hopefully knows what they’re doing⁴. Christine deals with an older dude negging the shit out of her in trying to scam his way to a physical relationship (and being too smart for his crap) while also dealing with her confusion over her own sexuality and her feelings for Abby⁵.

All of which is a lot to deal with in 330 pages or so, but Go With The Flow is more than up to the challenge of telling the story of friendships and periods, while simultaneously providing quality, truthful information about menstruation and more⁶. Oh and the art is inviting, with clear lines and distinct character silhouettes; there’s a variety of human shapes, sizes and ethnicities and nobody reading the book need feel it’s not for them.

I recommend it for anybody that’s having periods, had them in the past, can be expected to have them in the next couple years, or who knows anybody in any of the other categories; let’s say ages 10 and up. It’s available now via your local bookstore or comic shop.

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¹ The book both acknowledges and honors the experience of gender non-conforming and trans folk with respect to periods, and notes that some trans women can develop hormonal cycles that mimic period symptoms

² You can meet adult versions of them in The Mean Magenta, the webcomic that Schneemann and Williams started to discuss periods, and which became the basis for the book.

³ The rather condescending principal who explains to Abby that no there’s no money to stock the supplies in the bathroom and it’s not like the boys get free jock itch cream refuses to acknowledge that this is a hygiene issue, and he’d never not think about stocking toilet paper. He dodges the question of why the football team got new uniforms and equipment after only two years if there’s no money in the budget.

⁴ If you follow Williams on her twitterfeed, she’s open about her own experience with endometriosis, and the shamefully poor understanding of it that doctors — even OB/GYNs! — have of the condition and its treatments. It took Williams fourteen years to get a diagnosis and it looks like Brit will be far luckier in that regard, but the story ends without a definitive solution for her. The webcomics of adult Brit indicate that she’s mitigated the worst of her symptoms, but still way the heck over at one end of the menstrual experience spectrum.

⁵ Like Brit’s endometriosis and Abby’s quest for gender equality, Christine’s story isn’t resolved by the end of the book. She pines, Abby doesn’t notice, Brit does, but they don’t come out and talk about it. Again, Williams and Schneemann really get what Teens and Feelings are like, and capture the awkwardness of trying to figure out who you are with laser clarity.

Judging by the adult versions of the characters from The Mean Magenta, Christine found a way to accept her feelings and keep her friendship with Abby. Oh, and Sasha appears to have a type — the dude she’s with in The Mean Magenta has a pretty strong resemblance to the first high school boyfriend from GWTF. I’m pretty sure it’s not the same dude, but maybe?

⁶ I came to the book prepared to learn a lot and found as I went along that my sex education back in school was pretty good. Granted, transgender and gender non-conforming people didn’t really come up but I would have been getting that information from about 1978-1985. I will say that there was some remarkably non-judgmental content back then about gay and lesbian people, and at least an acknowledgment of prominent individuals that had undergone what was termed sex reassignment (rather than gender confirmation) surgery.

I was lucky to grow up in a window of time post-sexual revolution, pre-Moral Majority culture wars, when truthful information was seen as the best way to deal with the still-new AIDS epidemic. Also, thank glob, I grew up in New Jersey. I had to explain the mechanics of human reproduction to more than one of my classmates when I got to college in Indiana, after there was a spate of sudden, unplanned marriages amongst dudes on my freshman dorm floor and their first girlfriends away from home.

After all the lost time, we’re just gonna start fresh next week. I’ll be spending the weekend celebrating St Groundhog’s Day which, while not as important to me as some folks, marks the weekend in 1991 when my wife and I first met. Y’all be safe, we’ll see each other on Monday.

That post title sounds like a particularly unfortunate Doctor Who porn parody. Sorry. Let me make it up to you with a pair of brief items.

• I’m sure you’ve seen it, but Gunnerkrigg Court got optioned as a series. Reminder — we’ve been here before and it’s a long, long way from option to something we can watch. That being said, there’s a mountain of story that Tom Siddell has graced us with since my goodness, April of 2005 — the strip predates this page — and given the smart animated series that have been made since then (looking at you, Aang and Korra), it’s one that I think could find an audience. Fingers crossed that it progresses in exactly the way that Siddell wants.
• Haley Boros is an illustrator, designer, and comics artist from Vancouver, and she draws dogs really, really well. I mean, super good; she drew my good boy Flynn before he died, but it’s not her best dog drawing. Those are reserved for her good boy, Rusty, who among other things was the star of a fantasy epic using the prompt words for Inktober 2019.

  Now she’s Kickstarting a print version of his good boy adventures as a MAKE 100 project. 75 folks can get the print book (CA$20, approx US$16), 25 more can get the book plus a marker portrait of their own good doggo or other, lesser pet¹ (CA$50, approx US$38). And 31 people can get one of the original illustrations from Rusty’s Inktober 2019 adventure, on a first come, first dibs basis (CA$75, approx US$57). No FFF Mk2 on MAKE 100 projects, the potential backer counts are too small to make predictions, but it’s just under 50% funded with another 27 days to go. Boros is great, Rusty’s great, and the combo of his inspiration for her art is super-great. Check ‘er out.

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¹ I know people that keep various fish, cats, lizards, hamsters, gerbils, chinchillas, turtles, tortoises, pigs, snakes, birds, chickens, geckos, and/or axolotls as pets. They are all loved and wonderful, but deep down we all know dogs are the best and make the best portraits. Don’t believe me? Look up the warrior dogs that Ron Dan Chan illustrated on Twitter. I think the greyhound is the best, but the Pomeranian phalanx always makes me smile

Re: this situation yesterday. If anything, they are even more reckless today, requiring multiple halts to class so I can fix things. Tomorrow, maybe?

Just check me on this, okay? You’re following along an exercise in a course dealing with a very complicated piece of database technology, and you get multiple, literal red flags on the final status screen of the thing you’re doing. The text message that pops up tells you that the thing you were doing was pooched. Chooseable-path adventure time! Do you:

1. Tell your instructor and pal, Gary, so that he can figure out why it happened¹ and what needs to be done to get back on track?
   Go to page class is delayed by five minutes and it’s a healthy learning experience for all.
2. Decide that telling anybody, including your lab exercise teammate, is for suckers, leading your teammate to continue working on the assumption that everything’s good and unpooched, which puts things in a state where they cannot be repaired²?
   Go to page class is delayed close to two hours and while you learned something — literal red flags are there for a reason, duh — the primary takeaway is Gary doesn’t know how he’s going to fit everything into the remaining days of this very full class, good job.

So yeah — review when I can swing it. Maybe a brief post tomorrow, maybe not.

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¹ It’s because you didn’t follow the instructions, but we won’t know that for another 45 minutes.

² This rare double-pooching — where you are even more pooched than ever before — in fact renders things into such a state that even uninstallation and reinstallation will not allow all the functionality prior to the initial pooching.

Oh, and in addition to the un/reinstall, all of the work done in the lab landscape for the past day and a half must be recreated³ so that your two teammates are not prevented from doing the remaining exercises in the remaining days of the course because you couldn’t follow the godsdamned instructions and threw them under the bus re: sharing the existence of literal red flags.

³ By Gary.

Namely, the news relating to the Youth Media Awards given out at the ALA Midwinter conference, home of prestigious names like Caldecott, Newbery, and Printz. The librarians got their announcements on this morning, and the comics are represented up and down the list.

The big news, of course, is that the John Newbery Medal for the most distinguished contribution to American literature for children was given for the first time to a graphic work. New Kid by Jerry Craft takes its place among the classics of childrens literature. While books like El Deafo and This One Summer have been named as Newbery Honor books, those are the almost-won titles; New Kid will have its own court of Honor books to accompany it, but it is the actual, sole winner. Oh, and it also took the Coretta Scott King Author Award as well, just in case you were wondering if there were a better contribution by an African-American writer in the past year.

We’re just getting started.

• Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me continues its march to universal acclaim as a Printz Honor book (for the record, the big three awards in kidlit are the Newbery, the Caldecott — most distinguished picture book — and the Printz — for exemplifying literary excellence; all the others are a big deal, too).
• Both Stargazing and They Called Us Enemy were recognized with the Asian/Pacific American Award, in the Childrens and Young Adult categories, respectively; the award is for promoting Asian/Pacific American culture and heritage and is awarded based on literary and artistic merit.
• Gender Queer and In Waves received the Alex Award, given to the 10 best adult books that appeal to teen audiences.
• Hey, Kiddo¹ received the Odyssey Award for the best audiobook produced for children and/or young adults, available in English in the United States.

A full rundown is available at the School Library Journal’s website, and descriptions of the awards, their histories, and previous winners at I Love Libraries. Fleen congratulates all the winners, the honor books, and the nominees. You’re all doing amazing work.

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¹ Also a National Book Award finalist, a slightly big deal.

It was a joke, since the earliest days of Fleen — ask Ian Jones-Quartey when he would finish RPG World and he would delay the return by a month.

Eventually, he gave us the end of RPG World, in an episode of OK, KO!, some 17 years after he’d launched it. No more jokes about October 2038, no more complaining from people that it was their favorite¹, just some well-earned closure.

But the internet hates to let anything go; sometimes that’s bad, but sometimes it’s not.

When Jones-Quartey let RPG World go, he said that anybody that wanted to continue it could, and that’s what a guy named Bryan Howard wrote to me to tell me he was doing, partnered up with the pseudonymous AtariBetch. RPG World Fan Revival kicked off with a catch-up page and a pointer to the original Keenspot archives before jumping in with their best guess as to what the story might have looked like. Taking inspiration from the original, RPGWFR has had its own lengthy hiatuses before adopting a regular schedule in midsummer 2018.

RPGWFR isn’t a continuation Ian Jones-Quartey’s RPG World, but you could call it something between fanon and tribute. A fork, in computer code terms, maybe. There’s an awful lot of story that could happen between the last bit of plot before the Big Hiatus and the canonical end, so maybe it’s like a remix of all the stuff in the middle? It actually reminds me of something Dolly Parton said² in the last episode of the Radiolab offshoot from Jad Abumrad and Shima Oliaee, Dolly Parton’s America.

Dolly was talking about how her team is planning for the end of her career and a time after Dolly; she’s written some 3000 songs and we haven’t heard all of them by a long shot, and she’s spending a lot of time in the studio. Not producing full songs, mind you, but recording just vocals on a click track³.

When there’s no more Dolly, there will be all these vocal-only recordings that people can create their own arrangements around. Dolly’s music will last as long as people want to tinker with it and the current form of English is comprehensible. Shakespeare’s lasted 400 years and people reinterpret his work, but this will be people partnering with Dolly for the next few millennia.

About five years back, I said that RPG World was sort of immortal, and by letting people take their own whack at his toys, Jones-Quartey has done the same thing that Dolly eventually decided on. Oh, sure, he’s not the one person that’s universally beloved by everyone from conservative church ladies to drag queens, but there will always be somebody out that that finds RPG World to be the greatest thing in their world.

Maybe it’ll be this revival — or the 37th one for that matter — that they love and follow it back to the original recipe. Maybe Jones-Quartey’s next show or movie redefines storytelling so much that completists obsessively dig through his earliest work. Maybe other, uncompleted or orphaned webcomics need to thrown open in this way.

Or maybe we should just be grateful for the sharing that he’s done, and is doing as I write this — check out the unreleased work from OK, KO! that he’s been posting on Twitter for the last day, and enjoy the weekend.

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¹ Or maybe their kids, given the amount of time that had passed.

² Stay with me.

³ Not to be confused with a Chick tract; I don’t want to speak for the lady, but I’m pretty sure Dolly would have no time for Jack Chick.

There’s something that I learned years ago, somewhere between my college radio days and my job teaching, and that’s as much as you fill the space around you with words, nothing you say has as much power

as silence.

Which thought came back to me last night in the venerable Bluestockings bookstore/cafe/activist space on the Lower East Side, which was hosting the first of a monthly series of comics readings. Comics don’t get anywhere enough readings, not like books do, and that’s a shame — with the right sense of timing and a clear enough image projected, there’s real power there. The events folks at Bluestockings kicked things off with a trifecta of work by and about queer people, featuring Bee Kahn, Rosemary Valero-O’Connell, and Beatrix Urkowitz; this page is famously in the tank for Ms Valero-O’Connell and I wasn’t familiar with the work of the other two, so let’s start with them.

Bee Kahn brought an introductory section of a story that was self-published and debuted at FlameCon a while back; now it’s getting a slick reissue from a publisher (they can’t say who yet) later this year. Renegade Rule is the story of four women on a pro gamer team, trying to reach the finals for VR shooter league play. It’s hard to tell where the story will go from the excerpt Kahn was able to share (enough to drop the reader into the VR experience and introduce the main characters and their personalities), but it was more than enough to say this:

Kahn’s comic book caption game is strong. You’d have to get Matt Fraction on his best day to come up with captions that land with the same impact and humor. Remember what I said up above about timing? The text in the word balloons and captions in Renegade was mostly too small to read from the audience, but having to click through to add each balloon and box to the image forced Kahn to delay just a bit and it made each bit of dialogue and especially the captions land with impact. I’m going to be keeping my eye out for this one in the fall.

Beatrix Urkowitz brought four short stories, three of which were about the same character, and which displayed a visual sensibility reminiscent of Tom Hart’s Hutch Owen (maybe a splash of Sylvan Migdal thrown in), with a KC Green-like ability to take a premise, run it as far as you possibly can, and then take it even further. The fourth story Urkowitz shared was about the annoying person we all know, and it was good. The first three were about the lover of everyone in the world.

Specifically, and introduction to TLOEITW and how she feels, followed by a story about the lovers of TLOEITW (ie: all seven point whatever billion of us) and how they (we) feel about the situation, and a third story entitled Everyone Breaks Up With The Lover Of Everyone In The World, where all of us form a gestalt entity to deliver a break-up speech to TLOEITW, who concludes that she’ll go get drunk, but literally everywhere she goes is now populated exclusively with her exes. It was a trip.

Rosemary Valero-O’Connell read one of the three stories from her just-arriving-in-the-mail-to-backers-from-Shortbox collection, Don’t Go Without Me (if you weren’t in on the Kickstart, you’ll be able to order a copy next month). The first story in the collection is the title piece, about a date to a parallel universe where telling stories robs you of your memories. It’s haunting and echoes every mythological tale of not understanding the rules of a place, from Persephone’s pomegranate to those who stay overlong in Faerie. You can read an excerpt of it here.

The second story is What Is Left, previously released as a minicomic; I got a copy at MoCCA and loved it, but reading its sci-fi take on a doomed spaceship propelled by a memory-fueled engine changed by reading in alongside Don’t Go. The former is about finding refuge — literally, in this case — in memories, and the latter about diminution from sharing, and while the stories contrast with each other, they also sharpen and strengthen each other. You can read and excerpt of What Is Left here.

The third story, the one Valero-O’Connell read last night, is Con Temor, Con Ternura, or With Fear, With Tenderness; it asks the question What would you do on the last night of the world? Valero-O’Connell, in the making of booklet that’s a Kickstarter accompaniment to the collection, describes her first comics work as dialogueless, narrated visual poetry, and Con Temor is a return to that form. As the questions posed by the story got more pointed, as the reality that a Proverbial It was building, Valero-O’Connell got steadily quieter, and the room more hushed, the audience almost holding its collective breath.

The conclusion, a cliffhanger following a countdown from three¹, slowed its pace and the silence held as everybody sought their own answers to that question, while the screen was a-whirl with swooping curves and scarcely a straight line in sight. There’s an organic life to her work, one that focuses on things that live rather than things that are built, and it lends a vitality to the visuals that’s all but unmatched. Don’t even get me started on what she does with hair; it’s so good, it makes me angry.

Silences break eventually. The applause for each of the readers was well earned.

It’s like I told Roo², we’re in an age of comics like the current age of television, where it is not possible to keep up with all the good work that’s being made³. But for one night a month, Bluestockings is going to do its best to show you some work you might have missed otherwise, and for that we can all be thankful.

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¹ One that looks to the reader to fill in the ending, more than any story I’ve read except maybe John Brunner’s The Shockwave Rider.

² You may recall that MxRoo named the Fleen Fight For Fungible Futures Fund, and that we seem to run into each other randomly. Okay, a comics reading might not be the weirdest place to bump into a longtime reader of Fleen, but on the day that Jon Rosenberg’s son got his life back via surgery? I was in Manhattan on a work gig and walking on the street to lunch when I head somebody call my name. It was Roo, with the news that Jon had just posted that the surgery had gone well. We got a history of being together for awesome things is what I’m saying.

³ Which makes it even more baffling that there’s a cohort of miserable assholes out there who have seemingly devoted their lives to shitting on people making comics they don’t like — comics they think shouldn’t be allowed to exist because they’re about things/people other than the precise interests of said miserable assholes — instead of just reading what they like. They are literally denying themselves the time to read all the stuff they do like in order to try to destroy stuff other people like. Petard-hoisters, the lot of ’em.