Well, it’s been another rough week, with a lot of emotional energy spent dealing with the news that my partner’s mom is sick and trying to figure out what he/we need to do in order to deal with that. I also expect this to be a continuing drain for the foreseeable future, which means that I am scaling back some of my writing goals temporarily. The main thing that will be affected by this is my Dune readalong, though I’m still making my way through the book at a decent rate even if it’s not going quite as quickly as I’d like.

That said, I have some other things in the works for the next few weeks that will hopefully make up for the slower pace of things. I have a couple of movie reviews planned for some recent DVD releases that I missed at the theater, a several long-ish essays outlined, some listicle ideas that I think could be good, and I’m working on getting back on track with my regular book reviews. On the bright side, I have been staying caught up on writing my weekly recap and reviews of Game of Thrones, and I don’t expect that to be a problem, even if progress on all other work comes to a standstill. I will always make time for wine, Game of Thrones, and Twitter on Sunday nights. There’s very little else about which I can consistently churn out 3-5k words a week.

Last weekend, the winners of this year’s Nebula Awards were announced, and women won pretty much everything.

Today, Shaun Duke announced the winners of his own WISB Awards. Even better, though, is his longlist, which is excellent.

Hugo Awards voting is open from now until July 31st. I wish I was more excited about this, but it feels more a chore than anything else this year. Once the voter packet is available, which should be early this week, I’ll make my decision about whether or not I’ll be blogging my way through any or all of it.

If I don’t do it, you can always check out Joe Sherry’s blogging of this year’s categories over at Nerds of a Feather. It looks like he’ll be working on it over the course of the next couple of months, but his first post–on the nominees for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form–is already up to kick off the project.

I have a feeling that a lot of the discussion surrounding the awards this year will be centered on how to fix them or if that’s even possible. To that end, File 770 has a good post up detailing some of the current proposals and ideas for dealing with the Puppy problem. There’s also a Hugo Voting Idea Toolkit, if you want to try your hand at coming up with an idea and need some guidance. Sadly, the problem is much easier to define than it is to solve.

Tom Hunter, the Award Director for the Arthur C. Clarke Award, shared a very informative and interesting letter this week over at Medium in which he discusses some of his thoughts on the future of that award.

In other news, this week has produced a bumper crop of aggrieved male bullshit, mostly in regard to the release of a new Ghostbusters trailer, which is significantly better than the first one but still has ladies in it and is therefore ruining the childhoods of sad manchildren (and the women who inexplicably cater to their nonsense) everywhere. Here’s the trailer:

And here’s a good script for when some angry baby you know complains at you about it.

It turns out that hordes of angry men aren’t just vocally complaining about how women ruin everything just by existing. They’re also taking action! Apparently by giving low ratings on IMDb to things that women like. The revolution is at hand, clearly.

In a week with genre gatekeepers seemingly out in force trying to suck the fun out of things, Kameron Hurley’s reminder that the establishment has always hated the new kids was especially welcome.

As was Kay Taylor Rea’s reminder that it’s not our responsibility to educate people. Women (and POC and LGBTQ people) have always been around in SFF. We’re not interlopers, and we’re not fresh on the scene.

Even if that is sometimes hard to tell if you just look at the recommended reading and Best of lists people make. It’s a good thing that some brave soul is quantifying how fucked up that is over at the new Tumblr blog, Your Book List Will Be Graded.

Fun Fact of the Week: Hand flails have never really been a thing.

George R.R. Martin was interviewed in this month’s issue of Galaxy’s Edge.

Victor LaValle was interviewed for the Lovecraft eZine. I loved his Tor.com novella, The Ballad of Black Tom, and the prospect of a sequel is pretty thrilling.

Rachel Swirsky interviewed Ken Liu. I’m so excited for The Wall of Storms later this year, and am feeling extra sad right now because I haven’t gotten around to reading The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories yet.

Lin-Manuel Miranda is in the group of people kind of around my age that make me feel equal parts super-motivated and completely ashamed and despairing of my abilities, and the commencement address he gave at UPenn last weekend needs to be listened to.

I’m sad to report that Fantastic Stories has cancelled their Kickstarter campaign for their Queers Take Over project. However, the idea isn’t dead. Instead, they’re working on regrouping and are currently asking for suggestions on how to improve their next attempt.

I’ll leave you this week with this amazing trailer for a movie I hadn’t heard of before today, Yamasong: March of the Hollows. It looks GORGEOUS: