As somebody who reads a lot of books that aren't written for adults, including books written for a lower grade level than even the first Harry Potter was: they are right and they should say it.
I will also add that a big part of J.K. Rowling's clout lies in mass market appeal. While she wrote from a very narrow perspective, she wrote something that marketers knew how to position to sell to millions.

And a lot of what makes stronger writing stronger is a sharper focus.
And another thing about this kind of comparison is that Rowling's claim to fame is having written 7 books in a single continuing narrative. If R.L. Stine didn't compete at her level, it's unsurprising as he was playing a different game.
The game that Stine and most other kidlit authors who became a household name is played is called "Well, They Can't All Be Winners" whereas Joanne Koanne Roanne, after she struck oil, was playing "Make It Count Because It All Rides On The Next One".
Rine Line Stine.

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More from @AlexandraErin

9 Jan
Earlier today I explained my thoughts on a meal that was served with gravy over it by explaining that my reaction to gravy on anything can be summed up as "This could have been an email."

I don't know exactly what I mean by that, only that it's how I feel.
Like, if I already like something, then the gravy doesn't add anything I need and might obscure or alter what I like about it.

And if I don't like it, then the gravy's not going to change that.

So it's unnecessary to my experience, at best.
Nota bene: You can like gravy all you like. This isn't my hot take on gravy or my attempt to cancel gravy; I'm describing an aspect of my tastes. Your taste can differ from mine without it being a debate or an argument or a tournament known as Mortal Kombat.
Read 6 tweets
8 Jan
So, Tabletop Simulator's statement here, in the most charitable interpretation of how it happened, was written by someone from @BerserkGames who was only familiar with one ban out of a sequence of bans, which they had only been told a self-serving summary of how it had happened.
The description of a user "spamming different key words in an attempt to get flagged" describes an event near the end of the affected user's account of events, linked in this tweet.

Laughably and sadly, that was the user saying she was cis and straight.

And the moderator she sought clarity from about why saying she was cis and straight didn't result in a chat ban when saying she was gay (consistently) did, the mod retroactively banned her for it, and the reasons he gave included "discussing sexuality".
Read 5 tweets
8 Jan
I'm seeing a lot of people asking for a generous reading of this and saying things like "She didn't mean it's encouraging that the unwell are dying but that the well aren't."

I have two things to say about that.
First, the problem with eugenics isn't that it's just so negative.

So rephrasing a eugenicist idea as a positive ("More healthy people!" instead of "Fewer sick people!") doesn't make it not eugenics, or fix the problems that make eugenics deplorable.
And second, if she'd meant something *completely* else... if it should come out that what she meant was something more like, "It is imperative that we do more to protect the vulnerable because so many of them are dying."... the fact that she said what she said is still a problem?
Read 7 tweets
7 Jan
Yeah, to the second point here: I believe that to a transphobic, cis-centric society, *not* gendering people at every available turn reads as a security threat, because they're insecure if people around them aren't being gender-marked.
In the past when I talked online about taking gender markers off airline tickets I had people -- who clearly had never given the matter a second's thought -- immediately declare that this would make flight less safe by making it harder to know who is flying.
And it's like... our tickets are already tied to a unique identifying number on our government-issued photo IDs. There's not someone out there with my legal name, my number, and a different gender. So where's the safety risk?
Read 9 tweets
7 Jan
Here's a thing: if you write an essay about your warm and complicated feelings about your husband, and it has a headline, lede, and deck about how awful he is and how much you hate him, AND the essay is behind a paywall?

Most people who see those things won't read the essay.
That "Oh, nobody is reading critically these days, readers are so stupid and gullible." take is missing the point. You can talk about how a savvy consumer should know better than to fall for false advertising, if you want, I guess, but this isn't a question of literacy.
Very possibly not.

And arguably the sardonic, self-deprecating (by way of family-deprecating) approach to the essay's intended point is valid, if a terrible idea given the current state of the art/the industry.

But the essayist wrote it in this world.
Read 27 tweets
7 Jan
I know I've told the story about how I quit the shady telemarketing place before, but I'll tell it again.
This was a cold-calling sales job, but it wasn't phrased to us or the customers as a sales job. We were the "scheduling" department. The sales reps were in the field. We were supposed to call someone and get whoever answered the phone to say "yes" to a visit from the sales rep.
The company was nominally a home-improvement company. Sold siding and windows and a few other things (gutters, maybe?) so that if we encountered somebody who didn't believe us when we told them they needed X, we would pivot to Y and then Z.
Read 28 tweets

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