wolffyluna

I keep planning to do a write up of the books I've read recently but I am... kind of in the middle of writing a novel under a deadline. (But hey! I'm at 25k out of 50k!) So. Write ups of books will happen later.

The votes are in! I'm going to be writing Sapphic Steppe Atrocities!

Thank you everyone!

I have finally read books! Depressing ones, because of who I am as a person!

How To Survive a Plague by David French

A very detailed look at the New York gay community’s response to the AIDs crisis. Like, it goes into specific people’s romantic drama levels of detail.

By the end of it, I was definitely not crying, I was just chopping onions while listening to an audiobook. Just. Man. You had a disease that was a death sentence and no one knew why and then, with the help of the doctors every gay guy went to get STI treatment from because they were cool, and Wall Streeters with congressional ambitions, to drug addicted sex workers, to grad students adding baking soda to industrial processes-- it became a something you could take a pill for and the pills actually worked. People got out of hospital beds and then lived to the end of their natural lifespans. So many people died but-- people got to live.

Some random takeaways:

• At the beginning, there was debate about whether AIDs was caused by a virus, or by a semen overload/allergy. Weirdly enough, the second theory was considered less homophobic? Also, it took people years to go “wait, it doesn’t matter if it’s caused by a virus or by semen itself, we all agree that exposure is the dangerous thing, so. Uh. Why not use condoms?”
• I did not, going into this, expect to end up deeply dislike Dr Anthony Fauci, or questioning why we gave him another shot at handling a crisis. But I do think Dr Fauci should consider signing up for a randomised controlled trial of whether being punched by time travelling Australians increases Good Sense in infectious disease researchers.
• I am endlessly charmed by the pharmaceutical researchers who, trying to hurry things to a human trial where they might save patient lives, did the initial animal testing for safety and bioavailability on ‘big chimps.’
• Wow, AIDs activists were a strange bunch. Like, they tended to be either doomsayers (who started multiple non profits and got kicked out of them for causing too much social drama) or the sort of person who when told “you’re going to die in two years, it’s going to suck, and every time you get stressed you take another step into the grave” went “quick! I need to do an activism! Take over a pharmaceutical company as a protest!”
• Speaking of which there needs to be an Act Up heist movie. Pride (2014) is not enough, we need more.

Our Bodies, Their Battlefield by Christine Lamb

A book about rape as a tool of war and genocide, mostly made up of interviews with survivors.

It’s deeply depressing and requires all the content warnings, especially because it gets quite graphic. Very informative though! To give an example of something that does not require all the content warnings: there’s a conflict between war crimes prosecutors and survivors of sexual violence, because the prosecutors tend to go “the definition of torture includes sexual assault, by charging these people with torture, I have covered both sexual and non-sexual torture.” Meanwhile survivors often want people to be additionally prosecuted for rape, and don’t see prosecuting people for torture as ‘counting.’

I do have some caveats: this was very much written by a journalist, and It Shows. The interviews are very good, the analysis occaisionally goes off the rails, and there’s this thing where-- hmm, how to phrase. There’s calls for the international community to ‘do something.’ Sometimes this ‘something’ has a subject, object and a verb, is something the international community can do, and is something that public pressure might cause a change to. (For example, charging war criminals with torture and rape.) Sometimes the something is left very vague, in ways that implies Lamb wants a US backed coup and doesn’t realising that’s what she’s suggesting?

Also it, was written in 2020, which is just long enough for some of the statements to have aged… interestingly.

Links

• [video] New Caitlin Doughty video! About orca grief!
• [video] Moon Channel answers the important question: is Rouge the Bat Latina? (Or: a silly question to kickstart a conversation about racial coding in fiction.)
• [text] a beautiful tale of fact checking, finance, and realising someone was probably telling the truth the whole time. It may be a negative result, but the story is told beautifully.
• [text] getting a suit will be either the most affirming or most dysphoria inducing experience of your life

It's a known thing that the recipes written by ingredient companies are often really good. Like, I know several people's cherished family chocolate chip biscuit recipes originally came from the side of the box of chocolate chips.

What I did not expect was for this rule to hold for desserts made by tofu companies. Which is to say, this simple chocolate silk pie that is also easily veganised? It is amazing. It's some of the best chocolate mousse I've ever had.

Just. Trust me. It's great.

I'm making plans. Ill advised plans. You see, I want to write another original novel. I did it once, and it's made me want to do it again. I have evidence that "spend a month writing a first draft" is a strategy that works. But I don't want to wait till November! That so long to go!

So, plan:

1. I Observe Femslash February
2. in March, I pre-write things for Disabled Whump and H/C month in April
3. …so in April I can try and write the first draft of a novel.

I shall call it "National Write A Novel in April, Because Who's Going to Stop You, The Cops? Month" Or NoWriNoApBeWhoGoStoYouCoMo, for short.

This femslash february there is an event for getting prompted with song lyrics, and I have signed up!

Feel free to throw prompts at me.

Good news! I am now actually reading books! ...I just haven't finished any.

• a guide to spotting AI crochet patterns
• Molly of the Weibo substack has written an article about Chinese internet slang! ...this may be more exciting if you know of both the Weibo substack and Asterisk magazine. But it's a good article!
• the gold command uniforms in Star Trek the Original Series? Actually green.
• stuck writing? get a crappy elf to do it!
• [resources for making book covers[(https://www.patreon.com/posts/118846775?utm_campaign=postshare_creator&utm_content=android_share)
• Admiral Cloudberg on the crash that killed the Mozambican president

I went on a trail ride today and it was Surprisingly Exciting.

You see, I was the only client booked on the ride, so it was just me, the leader, and the back rider.

I was put on E, the lovable old man, because he was known to be my favourite.

But the leader took the opportunity to ride a horse who wasn’t that experienced to increase his Trail Ride XP. This is pretty normal, the lead horse is often one that is in training because the trail leader is literally a professional so they’re a good person to give the horse the experience.

Except this horse was Literally Four.

For context, horses only get saddles and riders put on them at 3, and people are shirty about making them work hard until 4 or 5.

Anyway, we’re riding along, so far so chill–

Until there’s a jogger coming straight towards us.

The lead horse stops. Starts dancing in place, turning around to block the jogger.

The leader is trying to get their horse to go on.

The jogger is still coming. The lead horse spins around, and runs into me and E. I am just sitting so still, because that’s probably the right answer?

The lead horse is not-quite-rearing and running for their life from the jogger. The back rider is trying to catch him. THE JOGGER IS STILL COMING.

At this point I can’t see what’s happening, because it’s all behind me and I don’t want to turn in the saddle too much lest E Sense Fear.

Anyway, the jogger ends up past us, the lead horse gets coaxed back to where he should be and we continue the trail ride.

Apparently that was the first time he had ever seen a jogger. In his defense, as things to be scared of, ‘a human running towards you’ is frankly almost sensible? The jogger could have, actually, been coming to eat him.

Xie Lian stopped dodging eye contact. “If you wanted to fuck me, you could.”

Feng Xin’s brain grappled for some part of the idea that he could hold onto. The first thing that came out of his mouth was: “But Hua Cheng?!”

“He’s fine with it.”

Books

Paladin's Grace by T Kingfisher

I had heard good things about T Kingfisher, and borrowed the first book my library had without looking into it at all. So I was a bit surprised, after it opened on a severed head, to find out it was a romance. It's a very good romance though! The dialogue is top notch, and really sells you on why the leads should be together.

My only complaint is actually downstream of it being well written: Grace is an accurate* portrayal of living with trauma. This sometimes makes her internal monologue deeply irritating. But I want to give Kingfisher points for writing a character with a mental illness that just doesn't go away when it's narratively inconvenient, and is a really accurate depiction of a specific experience. And also: Grace has a conception of what's going on that makes sense for someone who lives in a fantasy world without the DSM, and it's so great to see.

*I am not the Queen of Knowing PTSD, and could be inaccurate myself, but. You know what I mean.

The Templars by Dan Jones

I am who I am-- I am a sucker for elite historical cavalries. And now I know more about the Templars!

This is a chronological, ~narrative history of the Knights Templar. (There's actually a funny section in the introduction, where the author feels he has to justify presenting events in chronological. "I know us professional historians know that time is an illusion made up by Big Chronology to sell more Timelines, but I'm having to explain this to lay people!") I found it quite readable, and I liked how the author actually got into the potential biases of different sources.

The Knights Templar was an odd organisation: it was simultaneously incredibly competent ('training not to break formation' was a devastating military technology for all it's simplicity, and they were good at it) and incredibly dumb (a requirement to always follow orders and leaders that semi-regularly went "what, are you a chicken? buk-buk-bukAWK!" in the face of overwhelming force lead to dumb outcomes.) Also, all the individual knights were (relatively) poor, but the organisation was swimming in cash. (Louis the IX got kidnapped and needed to raise a ransom. The Knights Templar would not give a loan, because they had sworn an oath to keep the treasure in safe keeping. "But you know, if you took the treasure by force, we'd simply have to get compensation for it once we got back to Acre, hintHINT.")

I now know more about the Mamluks, and am going to have to research them, as another elite historical cavalry :P

My one quibble with the book is that there is a time skip, and the thing they skip over is the Knights Templar and the Knights Hospitaller having a proxy war on behalf of Venice and Genoa, which feels like a weird thing to skip?

I knew that the Templar order fell because of Phillip the Fair, who had very realpolitik reasons for getting rid of them. But also he seemed to um, believe his own wild claims about the Templar's 'heresy?' It's weird in that this 13th century guy is very recognisably doing something similar to QAnon??? Very weird.

Also, fun fact that will now haunt me forever: the Knights Templar? Long gone. There is no secret order of Templar knights that still stands (because... how? The leadership died, everyone else got absorbed into other monastic orders.) The Teutonic knights, those johnny-come-latelies to the crusades? They're still a going concern... technically. There's not many of them and they mostly provide pastoral care to German ex-pats. But the Knights Hospitaller, whatever happened to them? I mean, it would be weird if throughout the last 800 or so years they were a going concern, even weirder if they were still having notable influence over the world. Like, it would be strange if a crusading era organisation was doing first aid for music festivals, teaching CPR, or running the Northern Territory's ambulance service. ...yep.

Links

• AcapellaScience's Seven Science Carols
• a comic about famous Japanese comic artist Nekojiru (suicide cw)
• exotic animal photo references for artists!
• "bringing a border collie papillon mix to an agility trial is like bringing a howitzer to a rifle range"
• the health risks faced by Disney Princesses
• having your wisdom teeth taken out while conscious
• and the most important question we faced this year: can you weave shrimp?