Livre d'Or

I was very interested in Jude Doyle's TERFs, Trans Mascs and Two Steve Feminism, and even more so in sbqr's thinky response.

( read the essays by the experts first, but my thoughts fwiw )

On a related note, I very much resonated with this piece by kiya: Better Days Were On Their Way, as well as the linked Grace Petrie anthem, about the specific brain damage that comes of having been in high school in the 90s I have a very different experience of gender from kiya and in a different continent at that, but I think we must be very close to the same age. So we were for the most part alone, and we knew to be afraid. I knew zero out gay people at school, and almost none in my wider circles. A couple of friends tried to come out to me and I didn't respond well because I didn't understand their necessarily coded language, so probably they thought I was basically more or less straight and cis and likely dangerous with it.

I definitely don't want to presume, but maybe this is an avenue of solidarity with trans men: a partially shared experience of being perceived as cis girls in a world where it was not only dangerous to be anything at all other than straight and binary gendered, but almost impossible to imagine anything else. Which is not at all to say that I think trans men are actually women, that would be a really offensively wrong opinion. But maybe we have in common the same danger and the same deliberately engineered ignorance affected people from lots of different genders and sexualities and backgrounds.

I have spent the last few weeks trying to cram a lot of Hebrew for my upcoming exam, and trying to find somewhere to live in London, which is frustrating even when you're relatively well off.

Anyway, I recommend this very lucid essay on Noel Streatfeild by Prof Farah Mendlesohn: Noel Streatfeild, Hiding the Queer in Plain Sight. I know there's quite a few Streatfeild fans in my circle, and quite a few people know Farah, and even if you're not in either of those groups the essay is worth reading.

So I'm sort of learning kosher laws with my chevruta (on a fairly basic level, we're not ready for Chullin yet), and we came across the most amazing article. I present to you:

Plotnick, Theodor and Holtz Jr (2015)

I love many many things about this, starting with the title. (Seriously, click through, you won't regret it.) I love that it poses a much more interesting question than, can Jews eat fantasy or SF animals? namely, were prehistoric animals kosher and how can we tell? I love that it really clearly explains kashrut to a non-expert (and does so in a way that doesn't assume that everybody is an Orthodox American Ashkenazi). I love that it asks and answers the crucial question about paleontology: what can we infer from the fossil record and phylogeny? I love that it is actually informative about evolutionary history, and that it's deservedly published in a serious scientific journal, namely Evolution: education and outreach, because it's a fantastic example of educational writing. I love the slightly snarky comment in the discussion section: many religious groups accept that familiarity with the Bible does not require a literal interpretation of its contents or a rejection of evolution

It's funny, but it's not Purim Torah, it's informative and exceptionally well written. Likely to be of interest to everybody who enjoys weird kashrut edge cases, particularly seekingferret [e.g.] and lethargic_man, and I'm sure there are more of you.

Someone on Twitter linked to this 2019 survey about what political opinions are regarded as "left" or "right" wing. The research is two years old and UK politics has basically imploded since then, but it seemed interesting. Particularly the fact that there is no opinion agreed by more than half of those surveyed to belong on one wing or the other. Pull-quote:

Even for the very most stereotypically left- and right-wing policies, half of the population do not identify them as such.

So the obvious conclusion from this survey, as pointed out by the person on Twitter, is that "left" and "right" are meaningless labels because there is no sensible consensus about which policies are on which side! But I'm also interested in the detail of specific views.

( politics noodling )

I have no idea what this means for the current maelstrom in a shitbucket that calls itself a Conservative government. But anyway.

So today I worked in the office for the first time in a year and a half. I'm exhausted from leaving the house at 7:15 am and not getting back until 7 pm, I've spent more time indoors with non-bubble people than basically the whole pandemic put together, and I'm not at all convinced it was worth it. However it is work policy that we have to be in person one day a week and honestly four days a week remote is better than the pre-pandemic situation of WFH being a very rare exception. The new normal involves hot-desking, and regular PCR tests, which I also don't love, but I think I will hate it less when it becomes more routine and when my team are also around for campus days.

Anyway, rather than whine about my mostly quite fortunate work situation, have some links I've enjoyed recently.

1] Twitter thread explaining kerning. Best if you can read both text and images as there are lovely animations explaining the concepts. If you find thread readers more accessible than Twitter there are some unrolled versions in the first few comments, though I'm aware that some people have moral objections to thread readers.

2] Video explaining an demonstrating American accents. On YouTube, visuals add a little bit of framing but are not essential. A transcript would be basically meaningless since the whole point is to hear examples of different accents.

The main presenter, Erik Singer, is a real virtuoso, a dialect coach who can imitate lots of different accents really well. Maybe all this stuff is completely elementary to Americans or linguists, but I learned a lot from the way he explains both the history and the phonology of different accents. And he's not making value judgements about different accents, just explaining how and why they are different. I particularly like that he invites linguists from various ethnic backgrounds to explain the accents of the communities that they belong to and study.

3] We're just at the end of the cycle of autumn festivals, with Simchat Torah, which celebrates reaching the end and restarting the annual reading of Torah. The Ark Liberal synagogue in north London has a cool video showing what the Torah scroll looks like. Many communities have a custom of unrolling the whole scroll for Simchat Torah and this is a kind of digital equivalent, though for some reason they roll from the end to the beginning rather than in the obvious direction.

This is also on YouTube; the visuals are the whole point. There is an audio track consisting of the kind of Israeli-Jewish songs that are often sung at the festival, but if you can't hear it you don't lose much. If you've never a seen a book written on a parchment scroll before the video gives a really nice impression. And if, like me, you didn't get to an in person Simchat Torah service because of the pandemic, it's a nice little memento.

This post is primarily about social media etiquette and fake news, but the topic is suicide so it's going behind a cut.

( critical thinking )

Recently read:

forestofglory: On seeing race in my neighborhood

elf: Game bundle sorted. elf has done a great public service by logging everything from the enormous itch.io #BLM bundle into a spreadsheet which can be sorted, and I love her enthusiasm for discovering that Games do fanfic of other games.. She's also started indie_games for talking about the games in the bundle.

Discovered via the titles meme, it turns out the ever-brilliant legionseagle has written Vorkosigan / Harriet Vane crossover, and it's glorious.

As every year, I found Holocaust Memorial Day very alienating. But I did come across a couple of essays I wanted to share (if you can cope with reading about genocide):

Ari Richter: Never again will I visit Auschwitz. (Graphic essay, will transcribe / describe the images in a comment.) Richter talks about how the concentration camp has been commodified as a tourist experience and incorporated into Polish nationalist propaganda.

delafina777: Comparing Jewish and Christian responses to the Holocaust. Price expresses something I also feel, but haven't been able to articulate fully:

The idea that the Shoah is inexplicable--while individual people's stories need to be told, I find the idea of making the entire thing into a cohesive narrative--especially one with a moral--unethical.

(Twitter thread; some people consider it unethical to transform long Twitter threads into more accessible formats, so if you want to read it but can't deal with Twitter formatting, I'll PM you a plain text copy.)

( comments on the links )

I've been pondering this post for most of two months, but well, life happened with intensity.

Someone in my dwircle made a locked post linking to this Tor essay by Cori McCarthy: Fraught With Destiny: Queering L.M. Montgomery’s Anne Shirley and Diana Barry. And melannen has thoughts about the book canon of Good Omens. I was particularly interested in point #8: It’s also very definitely not the story of Crowley and Aziraphale’s epic sphere-crossed love affair.

( I have feelings about romantic friendship )