wolffyluna

ain't I a woman? by bell hooks

"Wolffy, did you intentionally read this in February?" No, I tried to read it in January and failed. It's an interesting and also deeply depressing history of the affects of racism and sexism on Black women in the US.

Some observations, not the most important, but interesting: - wow, you can really tell this was written in the early 80s. Both things like "I have no clue what media she is referencing" and also things like "what do you mean the women's liberation movement didn't have a transformative affect on US culture?" There was one part where she was talking about the relative prominence of different civil rights activists and how the men were more famous, and she talked about how [paraphrased] "people know about (man I do not remember the name of because I have literally never heard of him*) but they don't know about Rosa Parks." Man, the past was a different country. - this book is weirdly like Darwin's On the Origin of Species. Hear me out: on of the things that's really noticeable is that he is having to argue his point with one hand behind his back, because evolution through natural selection only works if there is some source of heritable variance, and he knew of neither DNA nor the fact it can mutate. ain't I a woman? has a similar thing going on with the idea of intersectionality. Which makes sense, this was written 8 years before Crenshaw's paper, but you can feel hooks having to make her arguments much more [wiggle hands] deliberately and carefully than she would if that idea was already in the academic water. - so, bell hooks is one of those relatively famous authors who people don't... read that often. And certain ideas of hers get quoted more often. So, I knew going in that she was Very Pro Friendship, but not that she didn't like birth control and was anticapitalist. Though she comes by her anticapitalism honestly: she does not want us to become hunter-gatherers, but she does deeply dislike a system where people throw their time/energy/dignity into something that makes more money for other people.

*I feel bad that I cannot check his name, but alas, audiobooks.

Dungeon Meshi by Ryoko Kui

I recently finished the anime, which adapts the manga up to the halfway point, and then kind of. inhaled the manga. It's really really good. The art, the characters, the worldbuilding, it's all phenomenal.

It's about a party of adventurers whose healer got eaten by a dragon as she teleported them back to the surface. They're going to go down there to rescue and resurrect her before she gets fully digested-- but they are short on money and time, and so to survive the dungeon, they must eat the monsters in the dungeon.

Now, I originally passed on this anime/manga because it sounded like a particularly fantastical entry in that Japanese genre of Episodic Food Stories. And the food is important, but the story is much more concerned about systems. Ecosystems, economic systems, all slathered with the sauce of What Food Means. It is actually "deeper than it sounds.*

It's good!

Just as a content warning: there is a whole lot of cannibalism, and later in the story there's a lot of sexual assault as visual metaphor. (Which I am not warning for because it's in poor taste, the metaphor is part of what Kui is trying to say, but it is Pretty Graphic at points.)

Links - text: [how only fans took over the world]( https://aella.substack.com/p/how-onlyfans-took-over-the-world) (nsfw, natch) - text: [how to deal with stress when you can't really affect the situation] (https://bsky.app/profile/questauthority.bsky.social/post/3lgrwi3jiwc24) - video: ToddInTheShadows' top 10 pop songs of 2024 - video: why Russian history makes War Thunder players leak classified documents - video: what do Swedish and Norwegian speakers thing of each other's languages?

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?

Books

The Mongol Storm by Nicholas Morton

It's a book about the geopolitical affects of the Mongol Empire especially in the Middle East/ North Africa/ Eastern Europe. I quite enjoyed it, though I kept having moments of "alas, history is not written by the victors... it's written by the literate people who decided to write down history."* It's mostly about how it affected the other empires and kingdoms in the region, so I know a lot more about the Crusader States (bad at things unless they were the Templars, thought the Mongols were Coming to Help) and the Abayyid Empire (descendants of Saladin, had particularly chaotic inheritance policies.) Also I found about exactly how horrifying the sack of Baghdad was, so that's... fun.

( content warnings for mass death and sexual assault )

*The Mongol Empire did write things, they just tended to be, uh. prosaic. Unless they were threats. Sometimes they wrote those down!

Bride's Story volume 1 by Kaoru Mori

This is a very pretty historical romance manga with pretty clothes and horses, about a 20 year old steppe nomad woman in an arranged marriage to a 12 year old boy in a settled town in Central Asia. I mostly enjoyed it? The art is very nice, and there's a good sense of atmosphere which is what I like in a historical. There's just the... let's be charitable and call it 'the age gap.' The manga doesn't ogle the boy, but it does ogle him ogling her, you know what I mean? I'm not sure if I'm going to read the later volumes, we'll see.

Mummy Told Me Not To Tell by Cathy Glass

Cathy Glass is an experience foster mother who has written so many memoirs about her fostering children. They're very readable brain candy; I read this one in one day. I enjoyed it, but I don't think it's her best. Some of this is just 'real life does not always give you good arcs, even if you try hard to squash it into one,' some of this is me having an allergy to hiding information from children to avoid "sullying" them, especially when you have good reason to believe the child already knows.

Links:

• I'm going to avoid having too much angsting about the US Election, but sometimes, in times of trouble, you just need to be reminded that you can buy a malaria net
• a blog post about how to run horror ttrpgs
• how google maps made itself work in India, which doesn't have street names in a lot of places
• you know that super homoerotic poem about Chicago?
• a series of short videos about making an art exhibit in a dumpster
• timely: there is attempts to block under 16 year olds in Australia from accessing social media. I ended up making a submission to the Senate committee, and am having major 'the enemy of my enemy' feelings about Elon Musk and Pauline Hanson encouraging people to do put in submissions. (Hipster voice) I found out about the submissions before it was cool, via Denise of Dreamwidth.

Short Stories

• The V*mpire by PH Lee: Really good! Can read it for free! Mind the warnings! It's about the very particular viper pit of 2010s queer tumblr. It's about abusive relationships. It's about abusive vampires in 2010s queer tumblr. I spent the whole day after reading it with a mental red string board. It's great.

Links: - Why is my TV saying it hates me? - a guide on small talk written for nurses.

Books

It's a medieval double feature, baby!

The Middle Ages: Everyday Life by Jeffrey L Singman

This book deliberately tries to be a mid-point between "books aimed at high schoolers" and "academic texts," something for the interested adult that doesn't know too much already. It's divided into sections based on different groups in the Medieval period, from peasants in villages to nobles in castles to monks to people in towns. It focuses a lot on daily living, especially ~material aspects like "what did they eat?" "what were their houses like?" and "what as a daily schedule." I have to say, while I wouldn't want this as my only source if I was writing historical fiction, it'd be a great place to start. I now have a much better idea of how castles actually worked! I know the monkly schedule! I KNOW WHAT THE THREE FIELD SYSTEM IS! My only caveat is that Singman has... interesting opinions on the Medieval diet. (He over weights the 'Medieval peasants didn't get heart disease' and under weights 'Medieval peasants regularly got scurvy and sometimes starved to death.'

Queens of the Crusades by Alison Weir

aka Plantagenets Behaving Badly.

This is about Eleanor of Aquitane, her descendants, and their wives. It's also about the giant mess of arranged marriages, and the ways a lot of the Plantagenet men made it so much worse by being physically incapable of keeping it in their pants. (At one point one of them had an open affair with his son's betrothed, which would have been bad enough except that under Medieval Catholicism, that made his son's marriage incestuous, but they couldn't explain it without pissing off the betrothed's father who was King of France, and a whole bunch of wars happened because of this.)

Though some of the Plantagenet men are nice to their wives! ...and let them be some of the worst landlords in the history of being landlords.

Oh, and I learned that Richard the Lionheart was a rapist which. makes the child friendly Robin Hood stories read very differently. And also the general historical remembrance of him. deeply frustrating.

There's something about having that all laid out chronologically which is Englightening about the Times and Culture. It's a heavy read, but I did enjoy it.

Links

• Psych wards are really poorly designed. Admittedly I like this one because it's a psychiatrist pointing out things that even I, a layman, had noticed, and it's very vindicating! (Eg things like "if you get obsessed with safety and that's the only thing you measure, you create places that are awful to be and are ...bad... for people's mental health.")
• Australian Indigenous are and dot controversies. This is an interesting news article about the thing where-- the standard idea of Indigenous Australian art is dots? Except that's a very Western Desert thing (which was where one of the first big successful studios was.) But now it's become a general signifier of Indigenous art, and this drives some people up the wall, eg artists who are not from the Western Desert who have researched their culture's traditional art and are having to fight to go 'the thing I am making is traditional! We didn't use dots!', and also artists from the Western Desert who are a bit "...hey... this doesn't become totally chill and not totally cultural appropriation just because other Indigenous people are doing it..." Interesting article, well worth a read.
• and for something short and sweet: a funny skit about dreams

A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman

I actually read this a while ago! And could have sworn I wrote it up here, but apparently not? I can recommend it as book about the 14th Century. It's dense as hell, but it's very informative. It follows the life of Enguerrand de Coucy, normal-ish nobleman who had a lot written about him, as a scaffold for following what the heck was going on at the time, but the book often gets side tracked by mystery plays or discussions of how inheritance works. It's real good! Also, depressing.

The Wave by Susan Casey

I borrowed this book because it claimed to be about the science of waves, especially big, 100ft waves. And it's... not not about that? But primarily, it is anthropological and narrative look at big wave surfer culture in the late 2000s, with a smattering of science, insurance, and salvage to round it out.

And I would have preferred more science and salvage, but I can't say I disliked learning about surfer culture? Though I'm not sure Casey realised how excitingly toxic the culture she was talking about is? (Big wave surfing requires teamwork, which leads to dynamics where you can't stop unless you have a good enough 'excuse' like nearly dying. It's very sexist. And-- okay this might be my weird bugbear, but it's obviously really expensive, but no one seems to ever ask where the money comes from? It took me till nearly the end of the book to realise one of the main people being followed owns a pineapple farm, and I'm not 100% on whether he works it himself or not.) But yeah, I can admit to being interested by the adrenaline junkies. And also the way the waves at different places have-- distinct personalities? And some of it is anthropomorphism, sure, but it's not unjustified anthropomorphism? But it's also funny how while all these locations are chosen because they might produce real big waves, people talk about each location very differently; Jaws is the Grand Empress, Teahupo'o will fuck you up and maybe kill you but in a fun way, Ghosttree will fuck you up and you will hate every minute of it, etc.

The book is also an unintentional period piece? There's discussions of climate change and women that are. very 2008. It's Distinctive. The sexism I can explain-- there's a lot of normalised sexual harrassment and women as decoration in a way that's seen as indecorous now. The climate change is harder to put my finger on, but. yeah. Distinctly 2008.

Also, big wave surfing is another one to add to my silly list: you know how anti kink people like to use the existance of sub drop as evidence kink is unethical? I like to keep a list of things that cause something that is clearly subdrop, while not being kinky at all. Big wave surfing: not unethical because it's sexist, dangerous, or expensive. Yes unethical because getting dommed by Neptune causes subdrop.

A Rape in Cyberspace by Julie Dibbel link Warning for sexual assault and harassment.

Another period piece! This is an essay about an incident that happened at a MUD (think text based roleplay thing with a database behind it), where someone else took control of other people's characters to force them to do violent and sexual things, and the community's response to it. It's very much about the early days of the internet and working out how to deal with bad behaviour. It's also about [wiggles hands] harms that can be done in cyberspace, what it means to be hurt when it's a virtual body that gets hurt and what that means for the meat person behind it. It's an interesting read!

Legendborn by Tracy Deonn

I ended up in a loop of borrowing it from the library, getting partway through and having to return it to give to the next person in the hold queue, and then waiting in the hold queue to borrow it again. But finally! I have escaped the loop! And I really enjoyed it.

Brianna Matthews has been accepted into an early college program shortly after her mother died in a hit and run accident. She's not coping, and not helping is the fact she's found out there's a group of mind wiping demon hunters on campus that might be responsible for her mother's death.

I like Bree's POV; she comes across as being on the raw edge of a break down all the time.

There's another thing I liked, but it's difficult to explain without spoilers. So, you know how often in fantasy stories you get half fairy characters where it's obviously a metaphor for being mixed race, or werewolves as a disability metaphor, but there's zero non metaphorically mixed race or disabled people? Legendborn very much does not do that. Bree is black, and the story is a lot about family and legacy and the way racism affects that, and it comes up in both supernatural and mundane contexts.

I also like how magic works in this setting. There are different groups of magic users, and while you can tell they are all grasping on to different parts of the same elephant, they have wildly different ideas about what's possible and what's morally licit.

Fair warning: it's very YA, so maybe skip if you are not one for masquerades and tournaments and love triangles.

The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green

An essay collection about different aspects of the human centred planet, with the conceit that he's rating each on a five star scale.

I enjoyed it but-- I very much grew up on vlog brothers? Including John's philosophical videos. So I'm not sure if it's objectively good or just ~tastes like home?

Though it was interesting as a glimpse into John Green's writing process, which comes across as a bit and bizarre to me.

I give the Anthropocene Reviewed 4 stars.

I have a book to recommend! Her Voice is a Backwards Record, the best novella based on a philosophy paper I've read.

If all physically possible universes exist, so do all physically possible girlfriends… including the one you're imagining who's imagining you.

Ana's parents, who hadn't heard that it wasn't game-theoretically optimal to punish her for dropping LSD, packed her away to a troubled teen camp. During the day, Ana faces the harsh Utah desert, near-starvation, and torture in the name of "therapy." At night, she seeks desperate comfort in the arms of her alternate-universe girlfriend, Yuya, one of three hundred wives in the harem of the Emperor of Every World. But as their respective prisons wear away at their very selves, both girls face a choice: to become the monsters those in authority want them to be, or to die trying to escape.

Caveats:

• I do personally know the author and helped beta this. I wouldn't recommend something I didn't like just because someone I knew wrote it, but I will admit to being biased
• there is torture and institutional abuse in this one. It's Heavy.
• on a lighter note, Ana and Yuya do have explicit multiversarial sex while 17, so that's a heads up for that if you want it.

Passage to Dawn by RA Salvatore

This is the 10th book in the Legends of Drizzt series, and the last one I own. I can see why past me stopped here. It's not bad, as such, but there's this distinct thing of undoing narrative progress to go back (literally) where things started, as if Salvatore realised in the last book he was stuck. But it doesn't feel like the characters going full circle, it feels like taking things back to fix a problem that isn't actually a problem.

The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli

I have a lot of time at work to listen to audio books, and I've taken to listening to classics (along with other books, of course.)

It's interesting, and also reading it solved a plot problem I was having. It's interesting seeing all the "intuitively doing x feels correct, and you should never, ever do x."

I can also say that people using The Prince as general life advice makes more sense than the Art of War, though now I feel a deep urge to shout "IN ~~MICE~~ STATECRAFT" whenever it came up.

How Many More Women? by Jennifer Robinson and Keina Yoshida

A look at the way laws screw over women who have been abused and media that tries to report on it, especially civil laws like defamation laws and non disclosure agreements. It's deeply depressing and enraging, but it's a good look at the system (and the "the system is for what it does" thing.)

The Thief by Megan Whalen Turner

Recommended to me by a friend, and I'm glad I went in knowing that the narrator is constantly hiding things up his sleeves. I think otherwise I would have been annoyed by it not being a fair play mystery, but instead I was having a lot of fun watching the narrator's cuffs.

It's set in a fantasy Byzantium, with a strong political bent. Our hero, General, unwisely boasted he could steal anything and backed it up by stealing the kings seal. Now, he's been recruited by the king's Magus to retrieve a mythical stone of immortality that the king has promised to give to a foreign queen in marriage. Things Escalate From There.

Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree

A fantasy novel that is like drinking a mocha in a cozy cafe. There's more progression than conflict. I don't want to say it's low stakes, so much as stakes are dealt with quickly and with things ending up even better for the characters. Which in my opinion came across as weird at points? But like. If you want an aggressively cozy "orc makes a Cafe in a fantasy world" it fits the bill well.

Salt by Mark Kurlansky

History of salt. DNF. It didn't come across as ~credible as I like. (Some potential linguistic clunkers in the chapter on China, and treating Africa as one giant lump, that sort of thing.)