Reading

Entry tags:

books

Reading Wednesday

Just finished: Gothic Capitalism: Art Evicted from Heaven and Earth by Adam Turl. This was a good, if very dense, look at the intersection between art, the art market, and economic forces, and how we can create an authentically proletarian art. Basically the antidote to AI slop memes. I was just nodding along the whole way through, like, yes, someone said the thing. My one complaint is, as with a lot of small press books, it's not the most physically comfortable to read, with gutter margins that are too narrow, which makes an already challenging read more challenging. So if you're going to read it (and you should) see if there's an ebook.

Currently reading: Genocide Bad: Notes on Palestine, Jewish History, and Collective Liberation by Sim Kern. Sim Kern is a very relatable person to me, although I don't know them personally at all. They're Jewish but like, not closely tied to the Jewish community or faith, and they used to be a teacher, and they've been trying to make it as a sci-fi author. And then our stories diverge because it turns out their real gift is talking about Palestine on TikTok, and along with the death threats, they managed to get a serious platform.

The book starts with a lot of their story and philosophy, and then the bulk of it is devoted to unpacking and dismantling the main claims of hasbara (Israeli propaganda, literally "explaining"). It's all written in very approachable language with tons of footnotes. You can tell they used to be a middle school teacher. I don't know that this would convince someone with the Zionist brainworms, but for the average white American who doesn't want to be an antisemite, hears conflicting claims, and hasn't grown up in this confusing ideological soup, it's hella useful. I'd really recommend it as well for people like me who have to get in dumb Facebook fights with people who are genuinely convinced that Hamas is going to come kill them in some random American city.

Entry tags:

just one thing

Just One Thing (01 October 2025)

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished! Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

Entry tags:

The Essequibo (Buddy-ta-na-na, We Are Somebody, Oh): Pt 1 [cur ev, war, Patreon]

Canonical link: https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1884180.html

0.

The Essequibo River is the queen of rivers all!
    Buddy-ta-na-na, we are somebody, oh!
The Essequibo River is the queen of rivers all!
    Buddy-ta-na-na, we are somebody, oh!

    Somebody, oh, Johnny! Somebody, oh!
    Buddy-ta-na-na, we are somebody, oh!

– Sea shanty, presumed Guyanese

Let us appreciate that the only reason – the only reason – I know about what I am about to share with you is because of that whole music history thing of mine. It's not even my history. My main beat is 16th century dance music (± half a century). But dance music is working music, and as such I consider all the forms of work music to be its counsin, and so I have, of an occasion, wandered into the New England Folk Festival's sea-shanty sing. Many people go through life understanding the world around them through the perspective of a philosophical stance, a religious conviction, a grand explanatory theory, fitting the things they encounter into these frameworks; I do not know if I should be embarrased or not, but for me, so often it's just song cues.

So when I saw the word "Essequibo" go by in the web-equivalent of page six of the international news, I was all like, "Oh! I know that word!" recognizing a song cue when I see one. "It's a river. I wonder where it is?"

And I clicked the link.

That was twenty-one months ago.

Ever since, I have been on a different and ever-increasingly diverging timeline from the one just about everyone else is on.

In December of 2023, Nicolas Maduro, president of Venezuela, tried to kick off World War Three.

He hasn't stopped trying. He's had to take breaks to steal elections and deal with some climate catastrophe and things like that. But mostly ever since – arguably since September of 2023 – Maduro has been escalating.

You wouldn't know it from recent media coverage of what the US is doing off the coast of Venezuela. At no point has any news coverage of the US military deployment to that part of the world mentioned anything about the explosive geopolitical context there. A geopolitical context, that when it has been reported on is referred to in term like "a pressure cooker" and "spiraling".

The US government itself has said nothing that alludes to it in any way. The US government has its story and it's sticking to it: this is about drugs.

As you may be aware, the US government is claiming to have sunk three Venezuelan boats using the US military. The first of these sinkings was on September 1st.

To hear the media tell it, the US just up and decided to start summarily executing people on boats in the Caribbean that it feels were drug-runners on Sep 1st.

No mention is made of what happened on Aug 31st.

On August 31, the day before the first US military attack on a Venezuelan vessel, at around 14:00 local time, somebody opened fire on election officials delivering ballot and ballot boxes in the country Venezuela is threatening to invade.

And they did it from the Venezuelan side of the river that is the border between the two countries.

That country is an American ally. And extremely close American ally. An ally that is of enormous importance to the US.

And which is a thirtieth the size of Venezuela by population, and which has an army less than one twentieth as large.

You would be forgiven for not knowing that Venezuela has been threatening to and apparently also materially preparing to invade another country, because while it's a fact that gets reported in the news, it is never reported in the same news as American actions involving or mentioning Venezuela.

Venezuela, which is a close ally of Russia.

You may have heard about how twenty-one months ago, in December of 2023, there was an election in Venezuela which Maduro claimed was a landslide win for him. There was a lot of coverage in English-speaking news about that election and how it was an obvious fraud, and the candidate who won the opposition party's primary wasn't on the ballot, and so on and so forth.

You probably didn't hear that in that very same election, there was a referendum. If you did hear it reported, you might have encountered it being dismissed in the media as a kind of political stunt of Maduro's, to get people to show up to the polls or to energize his base. It couldn't possibly be (the reasoning went) that he meant it. Surely it was just political theater.

The referendum questions put, on Dec 3, 2023, to the voters of Venezuela were about whether or not they supported establishing a new Venezuelan state.

Inside the borders of the country of Guyana.

2023 Dec 4: The Guardian: "Venezuela referendum result: voters back bid to claim sovereignty over large swath of Guyana".

Why?

Eleven billion gallons of light, sweet crude: the highest quality of oil that commands the highest price.

(I can hear all of Gen X breathe, "Oh of course.")

It is under the floor of the Caribbean in an area known as the Stabroek Block.

The Stabroek Block is off the coast of an area known as the Essequibo.

It takes its name from the Essequibo River, which borders it on one side, and it constitutes approximately two-thirds of the land area of the country of Guyana.

Whoever owns the Essequibo owns the Stabroek Block and whoever owns the Stabroek owns those 11B gallons of easily-accessed, high-value oil.

Image from BBC, originally in "Essequibo: Venezuela moves to claim Guyana-controlled region", 2023 Dec 6

As far as almost everyone outside of Venezuela has been concerned, for the last hundred years Guyana has owned the Essequibo.

Venezuela disagrees. ( Read more [5,760 words] )

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Current Mood: cold
Current Music: Uffie - Poolside Goth

Another Dispatch From the Place Of Strange Things - Late September 02025

Let's begin with an academic paper exploring the way that online puppygirl culture embodies a rejection of those things used as markers of human success because of the way that the highly transfeminine nature of puppygirls are usually denied the full markers of humanity based on their transness. The author notes at the end the limitations around embracing inhumanity for persons who have been and continue to be treated as inhuman based on their skin colors and perceived origins, and that the relative homogeneity of participants in online puppygirl culture and media often gives them blinkers in places they could stand to be more inclusive. I enjoyed reading it, perhaps you will, too.

The still-apparently-novel concept that people who have systems tuned toward novelty and curiosity might be beneficial to current society (instead of only the hunter-gatherers) and that environments made for others are not helpful to them.

The Archive of Our Own reminds us that they are dealing with an influx of spam accounts that leave generic praise comments and then offer to discuss off-site things like making fanart for your story. Part of it is that such commercial solicitation is barred on the Archive, but the easiest way to spot it, other than the invitation offsite, is that the comment itself doesn't have anything specific about the story. It's usually posted to the most recent story that's available. And some of these spammers are creating AO3 accounts to spam with, so disabling guest comments won't necessarily protect you from receiving them.

Nostalgia for times where scarcity required planning and people got a certain thrill out of the act of chasing things and not knowing whether their selections would turn out to be good ones. I am more inclined not to be nostalgic for that, but to be annoyed at the way that the expertise of the record clerk, the librarian, and the bookstore buyer are being devalued in favor of machines that their promoters claim have intelligence and can do all of those things a human can do, and better.

Robert Redford, actor, director, and well-known environmental activist, has left the world at 89 years of age. He is also responsible for the body that produces the annual Sundance Film Festival.

Anonymous art creators have unveiled a statue of the current administrator and known child trafficker and pederast Jeffrey Epstein holding hands, celebrating their friendship, and using the text of the administrator's birthday note to Epstein as commentary. You know, that text that strongly suggests that the two of them share an interest in pederasty and molestation of women and young girls, buttressed by some of the public statements the administrator has made about his interest in such. (As well as having been found liable for sexual assault earlier on in his life.)

( EA acquisitions, foolishness and buffoonery, and the usual issues that come with having the unqualified promoted well beyond their incompetence inside )

Last out, the ways in which our understanding of classical Greek depends on the surviving texts that we have to work with, and therefore while sometimes a word does mean dildo, other times, it does not.

Yacht Club Games on the development of modes for Shovel Knight that allow for different-bodied designs and pronoun usage, and a good decision made by them to decouple body designs and gendered pronouns.

And a story of corvids who help break the cages around their fellows. Be gay, do crow. And, perhaps, show solidarity by demonstrating how foolish it is to require girls to declare they're "biological females" before they can play in sort. (While the article quotes someone saying it's foolish not only require girls to do this and not boys, and that girls teams are suffering because they can't field enough affirmed players, the real meat is from the teachers saying it's not fair to require this, and the athletes who are also choosing not to participate because of fairness issues.)

(Materials via

adrian_turtle,

azurelunatic,

boxofdelights,

cmcmck,

conuly,

cosmolinguist,

elf,

finch,

firecat,

jadelennox,

jenett,

jjhunter,

kaberett,

lilysea,

oursin,

rydra_wong,

snowynight,

sonia,

the_future_modernes,

thewayne,

umadoshi,

vass, the

meta_warehouse community,

little_details, and anyone else I've neglected to mention or who I suspect would rather not be on the list. If you want to know where I get the neat stuff, my reading list has most of it.)

Entry tags:

1SE for September 2025

Watch on YouTube

I took some liberties with the dates in this 1SE video so I could put in more footage from Maui. There are also a lot of cats. Not all of them are our cats. No one tell Astro and Comet.

Entry tags:

... oh no I was previously unaware of bay liqueur

And then today's cookbook browsing introduced me to the concept of allorino! But the internet can't agree on whether it should be made with bay leaves, bay flowers, or bay berries. So clearly the correct solution here is Some Of Each, right.

(I am also contemplating whether I want to add finely chopped fresh bay to the quince buckwheat upside-down cake that is high on my priority list for things to cook over the next few days, given how much I love the Ottolenghi lemon & bay cake...)

Meanwhile, my other recreational reading today introduced me to the concept of the "Brompton Cocktail".

( End-of-life care circa the 1980s, with specific reference to terminal cancer. )

Hanging Woman Creek

Hanging Woman Creek by Louis L'Amour

Adventure in the West.

( Read more... )

(no subject)

First, is my cat not the most beautiful cat you've seen in the past few minutes?

( Cut for size )

***************

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

just one thing

Just one thing: 30 September 2025

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!

Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

The Iron Marshal

The Iron Marshal by Louis L'Amour

An Irish boy grows up in New York -- and has just landed in Kansas.

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

just one thing

Just one thing: 29 September 2025

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!

Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

Entry tags:

pols,
us,
war

Poll: Sense of geopolitical awareness [pols, US, war]

Hey, quick temperature check. I've been reading a lot of media I don't expect my readership to read, and now I'm a little disoriented to who knows what.

Poll #33668 Geopolitics awareness check

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 109

What country do you currently live in?

What is your age?

12-19
1 (0.9%)

20-29
5 (4.6%)

30-39
15 (13.9%)

40-49
29 (26.9%)

50-59
37 (34.3%)

60-69
14 (13.0%)

70-79
7 (6.5%)

80+
0 (0.0%)

To the best of your knowledge, if the US were to go to war tomorrow, against what country would it most likely be?

Accidentally worked 9 days in a row

and now Callie is angry at me.

**********

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

vital functions

vital functions

Reading. ( Brosh, McMorland Hunter & Hughes, Melzack & Wall )

Dreamwidth! Down to two and a half months behind.

Writing. So many e-mails about objects. So many.

Watching. Farscape S02E06, Picture if You Will. The discussion about which of the Highly Specific Fetish Big Bads it was who was resurrecting in this particular context was entertaining in terms of highlighting the, you know, motifs. Of the work.

Playing. We have just managed some Fluxx. <3

Cooking. Batch of puff pastry for the sake of making two (of the three) things in East that call for it (because I could not quite bring myself to buy pre-made). Pleased with how the puff came out; mildly dubious about both the tomato, pistachio + saffron tart and the banana tarte tatin, but on the level of "I am unlikely to make these again", not "I regret making them".

Eating. On Tuesday we hit the point of Make The Internet Bring Us Pizza. The Pizza was very welcome.

Yesterday, Saturday, we went to say goodbye to Ruby Violet, i.e. we had cake for breakfast, along with hot chocolate. The flavours were all ones I was familiar with but I'm still pleased to have had them. (It is not impossible I will decide I want to make another trip by myself, though, especially given that they currently have the malted milk on...)

As mentioned we then also availed ourselves of an Ethiopian-and-Eritrean Veggie Combo and a piece of Japanese Curry Bread, both of which I am pleased to have experienced.

Exploring. St Pancras Waterpoint! Brief turn through Camley Street Natural Park.

Growing. Spinach that I thought was unlikely to still be viable turns out to in fact still be Extremely Viable! Spinach is go! And the lambs' lettuce has self-seeded nicely (so in fact I also had some of that plus some allotment rocket accompanying the tomato tart). Tomatoes continue to produce tomatoes. Peppers various looked very happy last time I went to see them ~~so now I want to overwinter them all~~. At home, the pineapple continues to grow and the lemongrass isn't obviously dead yet (and I'm doing something right with at least the larger of the two orchids...)

Observing. BAT, extremely obliging with the aerobatics. Good sunsets. Cyclamen various. Moon.

Entry tags:

Maui sunset

[Epic god-light over the Pacific]

I returned to the UK last Thursday evening. I went to work and had a hectic day on Friday, greeting the returning students and my tutees. This weekend we got the suitcase turned around and at midday today, the bloke left for Uganda. At some point our kids will remember what it's like regularly having two parents at home, but apparently that is not this year.

I have to give three presentations tomorrow, one of which is a two-hour lecture, so I shall leave this photo here and go do some deep breathing.

The School Reader: Second Book

The School Reader: Second Book by Charles Walton Sanders

A book concerned chiefly with reading. Vocabulary words listed before each story, poem, or bit. Interesting for the view of what they used to teach children. Views of science and of character.

Entry tags:

just one thing

Just one thing: 28 September 2025

It's challenge time!

Comment with Just One Thing you've accomplished in the last 24 hours or so. It doesn't have to be a hard thing, or even a thing that you think is particularly awesome. Just a thing that you did.

Feel free to share more than one thing if you're feeling particularly accomplished!

Extra credit: find someone in the comments and give them props for what they achieved!

Nothing is too big, too small, too strange or too cryptic. And in case you'd rather do this in private, anonymous comments are screened. I will only unscreen if you ask me to.

Go!

So, I thought I was getting a palmsized scrubbie brush with a soap dispenser

but it was a set of two regular palmsized scrubbie brushes for dishes. Which was disappointing, but E made the amazing discovery that they are really fun to smash together, bristle to bristle, so that's all right.

****************

( Read more... )

(almost the) end of an era

Ruby Violet, my favourite source of ice cream, are continuing as a business (I feel like that bit is important to say first) but will alas be closing their King's Cross parlour for the last time at 5 p.m. Sunday next, the 5^th of October. They're apparently still intending to have their ice cream van at Granary Square during the summer, and to have a variety of "pop-up shops" around London, but... gosh I have a lot of feelings about the amount of post-therapy ice cream I have eaten at the lovely big wooden table indoors and on the benches and grass outside.

So today we went to say goodbye (and I managed to drag a university friend into joining us, as they're also independently fond), in the form of Dessert For Breakfast: apple crumble + the hazelnut & hazelnut brittle ice cream for me; sticky toffee pudding and coffee mocha ripple for A. Hot chocolate for both of us. (I'm very glad we had the Afternoon Tea Experience in 2023 for Animals Week; by the time I thought to try booking a farewell repeat it'd gone from the online shop.)

We followed this up with some slightly more savoury food from around the entire Coal Drops Yard situation (one veggie combo from an Ethiopian-and-Eritrean stall, mostly for me; one Japanese curry bread mostly for A); fifteen minutes or thereabouts poking around St Pancras Waterpoint, an old water tower that was having a serendipitous open day; and a quick poke around the Camley Street Natural Park, which A had not previously met.

I'm very glad we did it.

(no subject)

I'm about two weeks out of the loop on DW. There are replies and comments I want to get to and I'm sorry, but my brain had just been... I don't even know. But I am here, I exist and am trying to muddle through.

Because of how run down I've been, I almost didn't go to the D&D event in the gorge. But, I last minute scraped myself up and went. When Eliot said that he'd arrange a party bus as a transportation option I didn't imagine:

Going helped a lot. But I'm still... I don't know how to describe it. My brain's just suddenly weird about doing things I usually do. Maybe I just need a few weeks and come back to it.

So, I might do random sporadic updates and if I am not replying to comments I'm sorry. I really value the conversations I have here, so I feel bad about just random posts for a bit. Just sort of resetting or something.