Follow Friday on the Blog: QuaintJeremy’s Thoughts

Our longtime contributor Jeremy DeFatta, also known as @quaintjeremy, kicked off his own blog, QuaintJeremy’s Thoughts, earlier this month. Since we celebrated the six-month anniversary of his weekly Batman series this week, and he has a few nice original posts up, this seems a good week to say “Hey! follow Jeremy!” 😉

Meet Jeremy

Jeremy’s contributions to Sourcerer are one of the biggest reasons we’ve been so successful this year. Jeremy is consistently our most popular blogger in terms of views, and he is the author of five of our 10 most-viewed posts. It’s telling that this blog really took off the month Jeremy started contributing. That says to me that he’s a blogger you might enjoy keeping up with.

He has a great feature called “Thoughts,” which are short, pithy and frequently entertaining. Things like:

I find writers who take being a writer too seriously really off-putting. I think, as a rule, I just dislike people who take themselves too seriously generally. And other abverbs.

You’ll find posts on a variety of topics at Jeremy’s blog that are just as good as the things he writes here. He’s recently written a very nice review of Glen Cook’s early Black Company novels which focuses on the principle narrator, Croaker. He’s also written about the future of DC’s New 52 and recently completed his collection of older editions of Herbert’s original Dune series.

Jeremy’s awesome Frank Herbert collection

Jeremy’s talented, he’s personable, he REALLY knows his comics, and he loves beer. He also has a very pleasing sense of humor. If you like nerdy things and beer, you’ll love QuaintJeremy’s Thoughts.

Follow Friday on the Blog: Things Matter

Things Matter is the blog of Hannah Givens. Hannah studies history and political science. She also writes fiction and is into Star Wars, Tolkien, and comics, among other things. She’s a regular contributor to our Feminist Friday discussion threads. That is a roundabout way of saying we have a lot in common.

Meet Hannah!

I’m not sure when I discovered Things Matter, but I know exactly when I started paying attention. 🙂

I discovered Hannah’s post on “Batman, The Hobbit, and Modern Mythmaking” in December, probably while browsing the Tolkien tags. It’s still of the most memorable posts of the last seven months for me. The headline says it all. It’s a trifecta of nerdy goodness. And if that’s not enough, it includes this marvelous piece of deviant art:

The Dolittle/Deviant Art

Needless to say, I reblogged that post. I came back to the thread a few weeks later, the night before Jeremy debuted his Batman series, and dropped Hannah a heads up. At about the same time, Hannah published “Are Star Wars Characters Interesting?” That post started as an epic conversation on a Facebook thread during the Snowmageddon weekend, then moved to WordPress. I reblogged that one, too.

We’ve been chatting ever since, and we’re friends now. Rose and Natacha (who’ve both had Follow Fridays on the blog) both commented on those two threads, and Therefore I Geek (who shall have a Follow Friday in the near future) commented on the Star Wars post. I’m still talking to all of those bloggers. I’ve talked to them long enough now to consider them friends. And I have Hannah to thank for that.

So give Things Matter a look, and a follow. I’m sure you’ll be glad you did.

“70 Years of Bats” by The DoLittle/Deviant Art

Follow Friday on the Blog: Rose B. Fischer

If you’re looking for a blog to follow, you can’t do better than Rose B. Fischer. If you follow her, you will not regret it. She’s an experienced blogger with lots of interests, and she shares my view that the be best Internet is an Internet that runs on respect. Just read:

So,  you’ll find all sorts of things here: social commentary, reviews, writing tips, and anything else I happen to be interested in at the moment.

I have a standing policy of positivity. My posts are meant to be informative, entertaining, and to promote respectful discussion.  I write about things I like, things I support, or things I’ve learned that might be useful to others.  I won’t make a post specifically to rant, disagree, or list off reasons I don’t like Twilight.

Sounds like a blog you want to keep up with, right? Don’t stop reading. It gets better. Rose has a page that explains what Dune and Narnia mean to her, tells you things about her life, and gives you three ways to contact her with ideas.  It’s one of the coolest blog pages I’ve ever encountered.

Rose thinks and writes about a lot of things. You’ll have to explore her blog to find all the goodness, because the rest of this post is about one project. Rose has put a lot of effort into thinking about and improving the way we represent people with disabilities in our art. I’m thoroughly behind it and doing my best to help it along. Here’s how it started.

Rose wrote a 14-part interactive series on the representation of people with disabilities in pop culture. She started it in February. I’ve read every word of it, and some of it twice. And she’s made it clear that she’s happy to help writers who are struggling to portray characters with disabilities in a real way figure out how to do that.

Rose and I are banging our heads together and trying to figure out how to start a discussion about improving the representation of people with disabilities in media. We’d love for you to join that discussion.

If you enjoy Sourcerer and Part Time Monster, there’s no doubt in my mind that you will enjoy Rose’s blog just as much.

Follow Friday on the Blog: Natacha Guyot

If you haven’t encountered Sci-Fi, Transmedia, and Fandom yet, you should. Natacha Guyot runs that blog, and she’s a fabulouls blogger. Natacha does things her own way, and she does them with style. She writes roundups, movie reviews, collaborates on projects with other bloggers, and produces consistently thought-provoking articles. She’s also a scholar and vidder. You can find a list of her publications here and a reflection on 8 years of vidding she wrote back in 2013 here. In addition to the topics listed in the title, Natacha also studies fantasy, video games, literature, roleplaying, gender studies, comics, and Bollywood.

Here’s one of Natacha’s videos that I especially enjoy. It uses Babylon 5 scenes and “Lost Without You,” by Darren Hayes and Delta Goodrem to explore family as a theme.

You can find more of Natacha’s videos at her YouTube channel.

Here’s her latest, “May the Force Redeem Us.”

Here’s a post Natacha wrote in April in which she discusses her writing process and why she writes about the topics she does.

I don’t recall how I first met Natacha. Social media does strange things to time and memory. Perhaps it was through an epic conversation back during the winter on women in Star Wars that I recall. That conversation went on for a couple of days on Facebook and migrated onto two or three blogs, if I remember correctly. I met a lot of people by joining in. In any case, I’m glad we met and started talking. Natacha’s an active participant in our Feminist Friday discussions, and has hosted it at her own blog recently. We also tweet together quite often. You can follow her on Twitter @natachaguyot.

If you’re in search of sensitive, well-written articles on a diverse array of topics, give Science Fiction, Transmedia, and Fandom a look. I’m sure you’ll be glad you did.