wolffyluna

All text articles!

• What happens if you put in place Trump's tarriffs in video game Victoria 3?
• The tale of the "wrongest bird" in movie history
• tips for enjoying things more

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

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 haven't posted a books and links post in awhile, because I haven't finished a book yet, meanwhile the links were just building and building up. Woops.

Now, I may not have finished a book, but I have finished the anime of Delicious in Dungeon. It's really good! It's about a party who's cleric sacrificed herself to teleport the party outside the dungeon and got eaten by a dragon. They're not going to leave her behind! ...but they have no food or money for food, so they're going to have to get by on what they can scavenge from the dungeon. It has great ecological and economic worldbuilding. My faves are Falin, Kabru and Toshiro, which I am aware is an objectively hilarious group of faves.

Links

• A comic about Rationality and Effective Altruism meeting at Secular Solstice. It made me feel emotions. Content warnings for animal harm and human extinction.
• video analysing the blind box toy trend
• a small reflection on suffering, witness, censorship and the Crucifixion. Warnings for violence, genocide, and hopefully nothing else that I have forgotten
• restoring a blanket that got burned twice
• article about the ethics of palliative psychiatry. Major content warning for eating disorders and suicide.
• book review about polyamory
• how to tell if you are in a Chinese drama
• review of Legends and Lattes by Travis Baldree
• TERFs, Trans Mascs, and Two Steve Feminism

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!

I have been ~~procrastinating~~ waiting to write this post until I had 'enough' books and links, but then I decided, screw it, let's do this now.

How Minds Change by David McRaney

There is a truism in political science, especially now, that you can't actually change people's minds. They're set in their ways, and nothing anyone can ever do will ever convince anyone of anything. Except that's not actually... true? There's many examples of people changing their minds, from individual examples of people who left cults and conspiracy theories, to broader scale things like 'same sex marriage could not have got as much popular support as quickly without people changing their minds.' This book is a book about the science behind changing people's minds. It's also a book about why we even disagree in the first place-- with a really interesting chapter about That Dress that was either gold and white or black and blue, and how that was a really unusual optical illusion that prompted a bunch of study, because most optical illusions people can switch which version they see, but they really could not for the dress. But there's also things about the way that 'the truth is tribal' and also the some of the scientifically supported methods of changing people's minds (and the way those techniques seem to keep getting independently reinvented.) It's a really interesting book!

And now, some links:

• someone creates the textless Magic the Gathering deck that everyone will hate! even you! which is imo hilarious, though it does raise the question of 'why does Wizards of the Coast keep making textless versions of cards with complicated rules?'
• Hank Green has strong feelings about figs
• a beautiful Gideon the Ninth AMV, with it's own cover of 'Take me to Church' to boot! (NB: so many spoilers)
• I've been rereading TGCF, and thus watching a lot of AMVs, and I must share them. (NB: also, very spoilers.)
  • Money Money Money
  • Love Like You
  • From the Start

I haven't done link posts for a little while, but I have decided to restart my streak!

Videos

I have been recently trying to clear out my youtube Watch Later list, and here are some of the gems I have unearthed:

• A Misguided Guide to Finishing Your Gaming Backlog and it's sequel How I Finished My Gaming Backlog chronicle one man's attempts to complete his gaming backlog in a year, and has some useful advice on tackling backlog clearing projects-- including some interesting discussions of psychology-- as well as some cautionary tales about his own attempt.
• What IS Minecraft stone, actually?. I love attempts to make Minecraft make geological sense, and I love the hot mess that is trying to answer what your basic normal type of stone is in Minecraft.
• understanding snapewives is a sympathetic look at the community through the lens of religion, and especially the ways the Snapists were weirdly similar to medieval Christian mystics.
• This is an amazing analysis of Hellfire from Hunchback of Notre Dame.
• and for something short, a very funny Utena amv

Text

• experimental archaeology at it's finest: tattooing your own leg to work out how Otzi the Iceman's were done
• Super Mario Maker, a game that let users make an upload Mario levels, was closed to new level creation in 2021, and was going to shut down their servers April this year. A community got together to try and beat every level ever uploaded

Sick Jams:

• I have recently got into Kid Travis' work. Strawberry Skies is my favourite of his original songs, but I also really like his melancholy cover of Industry Baby
• Planet Killer by PAiDA a jpop track about aliens and climate change
• Antonymph by Vylet Pony, a beautiful song and a music video that is a testament to the bullshit you can do with html