Reading Wednesday

[liv]

Recently read

Via nanayasleeps a very evocative description of a really terrible sex party. NSFW, obviously; the article is plain text and illustrated with a fairly vague modern art pic, but the site is a sex magazine and most of the links to related articles have more or less porny thumbnails.

The embassthon account in its entirety. It's a charity stunt by scattermoon, in which she dressed up as Carmen Sandiego and visited every single embassy in a single a weekend, and was sponsored to raise money for a refugee charity. I know a lot of my friends are into effective giving and are against fundraising stunts as a matter of principle, but embassthon is just a lovely piece of performance Twitter in its own right. Worth reading from the bottom up; there are cryptic clues to which embassy is up next, snarky comments about the embassies and their countries, lovely stuff.

Network surfing led me to melannen's adorable Big Hero 6 / Pacific Rim crossover.

cavalorn is slightly locally famous for debunking lots of silly fluff Pagan stories. This year he's come up with a rather amazing piece about church history: On Bede, pagan kings, rival Churches, and the Great Anglo-British Miracle-Off, where he explains, with great humour how: Rather than a simplistic matter of The Christians versus The Pagans, we are dealing with multiple cultural groups and multiple iterations of Christianity.

Currently reading Two thirds of the way through Imajica. Things are getting apocalyptic, which means it's not as slow to read as it was in the earlier sections. I think there's some very cool fantasy in this, but it's rather more padded than I prefer.

Up next I'm going to be acquiring some of the stuff you recommended for medical students for myself, no question. Well worth having a look back at that thread if you're interested in books you can learn something from.

Other than that I've come down with a very annoying digestive TMI bug. I'm not seriously ill, I was able to get on with giving feedback on student work yesterday, just uncomfortable and annoyed. And since I do have the kind of job where I can get away with doing this, I'm being good about staying away from public areas until I'm properly better. I'm especially grateful for technology, and thoughtful friends who use it, so that I haven't actually been stuck on my own with no company for the past two days.

So, if anyone wants to send me links I would be most grateful. At this stage of being not exactly ill but still in quarantine, I'm more interested in distracting, interesting, meaty stuff than cute adorable stuff.

Comments

[lovingboth]

There was a staggeringly awful programme on "exclusive" sex parties on Ch4 recently. I only saw a few minutes scattered through the programme - I stopped watching every time I wanted to throw something, hard, at the screen.

It's easy to see how it could end up being like that.

[liv]

I strongly suspect that the exclusive part is more of a problem than the sex part, really. But it's also a kind of schadenfreude fantasy, of rich beautiful people nevertheless having miserable sex.

[jae]

I don't know why I saw the "really terrible sex party" description and immediately thought, OH, I WANT TO READ THAT! Clearly, there is something wrong with me.

-J

[liv]

Heh. It's a lovely piece of writing about a completely cringey situation, which is why I linked to it. I mean, I don't especially seek out writing about terrible sex, but I can definitely see the appeal.

[cxcvi]

I'm still thinking about adding something to that list of books, but what I'm thinking of is less "literary masterpiece" or "great insight into how people work", and more "this is very relevant to my mental things work", and on a very personal level something that I would want my GP to read so that she can understand my mental things... and so I'm not sure if it's right for the list? It's also maybe something that I don't know how comfortably I can talk about it in an open setting, so I don't know...

[liv]

The information that has gone out about the book selection is that they are more interested in stuff that's personally meaningful to the people responding to the survey, rather than amazing works of literature. I think the approach is that if they get things that are personally meaningful to dozens of different people, they will get a better reading list than if they ask everyone to nominate the best work. But if you're not comfortable talking about it openly then don't feel obliged, I mainly shared the question on DW out of curiosity.

[jack]

The information that has gone out about the book selection is that they are more interested in stuff that's personally meaningful to the people responding to the survey, rather than amazing works of literature.

Yeah, that makes sense. I almost wanted to nominate Scalazi's "Being poor" as something people should know before giving advice, but it was scarily easy for them to just not really get until they have more experience.

[ayebydan]

I don't have links as such but something just occurred to me. If you have a smartphone, are you are of 'flipboard'. It is an app that is automatically on my samsung s4mini and you set it up to give you news by topic. You can narrow it almost like you can hashtags on twitter but for news ie, you can follow karsashians or microbiology or ISIS. You just flip between pages and scroll through the offerings. It is now available on desktop and I find it a far better site than streams, news apps or ...blogspot stream things I used to follow. Something to look into if new and you like the idea.

I sure hope you feel better soon <3

Now off do read some of those links :)

[liv]

Ooh, interesting thought, and thanks for the good wishes too. I had seen Flipboard on my phone and didn't really know what it was, but it sounds like it could be a useful way to discover new stuff.

[ajollypyruvate]

Feel better!

Would you be interested in some links relating to our current water crisis? I've been following a California Politics thread and there has been lively discussion around the issue.

[liv]

Thank you! I'm a lot better by today, but I'm always interested in interesting stuff, please link away :-)

[ajollypyruvate]

These aren't in any particular order. Some are OpEds, some are government surveys, and some are possibly rather biased. Still, they give an overall view of the situation and the problems involved with water around here. (Also, while there has been much talk about "the poor farmers!", Agriculture is one of the biggest offenders with respect to water waste. Also, golf clubs. I hate those people.)


http://archive.news10.net/news/article/268911/2/Debunking-the-myth-about-Southern-California39s-water-use?fullsite=true
http://www.sswm.info/category/implementation-tools/water-use/hardware/optimisation-water-use-industry/reduce-water-consum
http://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1405/
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/03/groundwater-pumping-sea-level-rise
http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_show.asp?i=1108
http://ca.water.usgs.gov/water_use/
http://ca.water.usgs.gov/water_use/2010-california-water-use.html
http://www.mullerranch.com/making_news/sacbee_drip_2_2014.html
http://blog.sfgate.com/morford/2015/03/17/california-water-anxiety/
http://gizmodo.com/here-are-the-water-restrictions-california-should-have-1692031986
http://www.politicususa.com/2014/07/16/corporate-greed-exacerbates-drought-nestle-believes-water-basic-human.html
http://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/jul/27/water-nestle-drink-charge-privatize-companies-stocks
http://www.sacbee.com/news/state/california/water-and-drought/article13908632.html
http://www.alternet.org/story/144020/how_limousine_liberals,_water_oligarchs_and_even_sean_hannity_are_hijacking_our_water_supply
http://exiledonline.com/california-class-war-history-meet-the-oligarch-family-thats-been-scamming-taxpayers-for-150-years-and-counting/
https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/oligarch-valley/
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-famiglietti-drought-california-20150313-story.html
http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/reservoirs/RES
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-pits-oil-wastewater-20150226-story.html

[siderea]

I have two recent Patreon posts up, one 3.7k words, the other 0.8 but which points at something someone else wrote that's 8k words, and all of the links in the comments on both have been excellent.