Riba Rambles:
Musings of a Mental Magpie

Posted by Lis Riba at 2:50 PM

Playing in Boston thru April 26th:

Anybody else interested in seeing this before it closes?

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:39 AM

Pirates and possibly Trolls

PS: Regarding amazonfail and combining the various theories that have been proposed, I suspect Amazon did have a policy to remove sales rank from adult material, but it was supposed to be narrowly applied. Thus, the early CustSat responses were following their assigned scripts. Over the past week, trolls found some kind of glitch and exploited it to massively reclassify works outside the intended purview of policy.
We'll probably have to wait until the workday starts in Seattle to learn more.

Posted by Lis Riba at 7:37 PM

The White House Easter Egg roll takes place tomorrow, and the Obama administration has been reaching out to gay and lesbian families to make the event more inclusive.

And get a load of the rainbow lei adorning the Obama's new dog, Bo.

Posted by Lis Riba at 6:48 PM

In case you haven't yet heard, #AmazonFail:

According to an official letter from Amazon.com to an author,

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Therefore, Amazon.com has removed sales ranks from books with gay, lesbian, and bisexual content -- including works without any explicit sex, such as children's fiction, history, nonfiction self-help, queer theory.

Meanwhile, many more explicit heterosexual works continue to be ranked. So, too, do anti-gay books. In fact, because Amazon has de-listed so many works of gay literature, searching the bookseller for homosexuality returns Christian propaganda and advice on "curing" gays.

Ugh.