Wonderful World Web

There have been a couple of things I've found online recently that have really caught my attention, and I just have to take the time to share them with you all! (Mainly because I was planning on having a post for today before my newest College Fashion post comes out tomorrow afternoon).

First off, the incredible convenience and efficiency of Bloglovin!

Bet you couldn't even tell I made this on Paint. Yeah, I can art. 

I came across Bloglovin by chance, when checking out some of the layouts of some of the favorites among the many book blogs I follow (the latter half of that sentence felt kind of creepy... "checking out" your "layout" sounds like some kind of blogger's pickup line). I first noticed the boxes conveniently placed with follower counts underneath, and then I started noticing the Bloglovin fashion icons alongside through random scrolling as well. It finally clicked with me, when my stats displayed numerous people causing site sources to appear from Bloglovin itself, and wouldn't you know it: there are people there!

After a few more minutes checking out the site and exploring its various features, I decided to sign up for an account. It has now been a week, and I love it! It's a glorious thing: instead of constantly having to remember not only the blogs themselves (and to check their updates daily), but to remember which posts from those very sites I've already read, it allows for a scrolling list of most recently published posts from all of my favorite blogs, and alerts me to which posts I've read and not! And the best part is, the interface isn't simply the kind for which you rely on a computer for easy viewing: my ENGL 302 class is a little more bearable when I can use break time to update myself with the Bloglovin app, as well.

So, ladies and gents, I am officially on Bloglovin, and it's a grand thing! Check out my profile HERE and see what blogs I follow, and make sure to take the time to follow my blog, as well!

The second thing that has me raving online recently, was the masterful recently-conducted "gender-flipping" cover art that Maureen Johnson and some of her fans were able to come up with, calling attention to the god-awful gender-stereotyping that goes on in cover development, and challenging publishers to do better.

Documented on HuffPost Books here - best read when prefaced by a post by the mastermind herself on the same site, found here - the project, called "Coverflip" simply proposed the question, "What would popular book covers look like, should the novel have been written by a person of the opposite gender?" For instance, Maureen Johnson... to Maurice Johnson. What would happen?

Well, if you followed the above link, things really would get different. And while it is incredibly difficult for me to even consider what Game of Thrones would be like if written by a woman (well, first off, boobs would garner descriptions probably six times less frequently than in original print), I can't deny that the "flipped" cover is an exquisite portrait of the kind of crap that would have been hastily thrust into my backpack before school, back when I was thirteen.

These covers supposedly tell the same story, but really? Couldn't be more different. 

Another favorite included the "flipped" version of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, by Sherman Alexie - a respected novel, on the part of both my roommate and I - which left us gasping in indignation (the disrespect!) as well as laughing outright, because I could have sworn I'd already seen that very cover on a YA shelf back at home.

On the whole, the project - at least, to me - bore a lot of strong similarities to The Hawkeye Initiative (which seeks to highlight the hyper-sexualization of female characters in the world of comic books... by placing Clint "Hawkeye" Barton into the same ridiculous positions and costumes). Gender-flipping fun, as well. Both organized efforts emphasize the great yawing canyons of inequalities existing in the realms of popular literary consumption, and do so in an incredibly cheeky manner (and if you know T.H.I., you know I mean "cheeky" in an entirely different way than you might think).

Anyways, those are some things I found interesting around the Web recently. I'll be back in a few days with an all-new review, and my newest College Fashion post comes up tomorrow, so be sure to check that out as well!