Mixtapes for Hookers

My head’s a bit muddled right now after trying to squeeze 50 songs into a 4 hour radio show and also with finding decent photos to match all the artists.  (Poor V Factory don’t seem to have a good shot among them, even by boyband standards.  Which is too bad, because Love Struck is definitely the best boyband song to come out since at least 2002.)

Romance publisher Harlequin’s been pissing people off left and right with their recently-announced self-publishing imprint.  Basically, the idea was that if you send a manuscript to Harlequin and they reject it, they’ll sending you a nice letter telling you that they can still publish it with the Harlequin name, but only if you pay them and not the other way around.  They’ve decided to shift their plans, though, after romance, mystery, and sci-fi writers’ groups all condemned the idea.

Also re: books, The Guardian asked an insane number of writers to name their favorite novels of the year, thus sending my to-read list into an out-of-control spiral.

House Of Vader made me laugh with his post about George Michael’s I Want Your Sex video.  Also with this link.  (Just the other night some friends and I were talking about what it is that makes people think singing along is impressive when you only know about 10% of the words.  If you see this, DJCire1, fill us in.)

WizardElite on trimming the social media fat.  The writer over there decided to ditch Tumblr, which is one of my favorites; I actually wouldn’t mind eliminating a couple of pointless social networks myself, although I’d probably get rid of LinkedIn first because, really, what’s the point?

Speaking of Tumblr, functional tumblelogs are few and far between, but Hard Print’s a good one to follow if you’re into hipster-ish arty gay print rags.

And if arty men are your thing, you may be interested in a 2010 calendar that some RISD students recently put out, featuring men of RISD and their moustaches.  It’s a nice idea and fairly well executed, although some of the photos are a little predictable.  (I like Mr. September, though.)  For some reason whoever’s behind the project also bought the domain sexconfident.com, which led me to think that this might be part of something bigger and more exciting.  I think I was mistaken, though.