Book Club

I try to do a summary of every book I read. I love sci-fi and fantasy and am currently working my way through Discworld. This is my main blog so I talk about other stuff, too.

[most-sane-classicist]

He knows what's up

[creekfiend]

there are a NUMBER of folktale Woman-Creatures like selkies who exist to make the inherently coercive nature of heterosexual marriage explicit and to externalize male anxiety about how if your wife had actual autonomy she very well might disappear and you might never fucking hear from her again

which is a FASCINATING category of Woman-Creature imo

[creekfiend]

someone said it's also a cautionary tale about mistreating your wife and I think that's spot on especially for other related types of stories e.g. the crane wife. like I think these stories are very much Husband Anxiety Stories. the Woman-Creatures are black boxes whose interior experience it is impossible to know and who have strange and often seemingly arbitrary rules that you must follow or else they will disappear. idk. like. that's why I think that any empowering-to-women-ness qualities of these stories is incidental. I think they're externalized anxiety about coercive societal heterosexuality and the inability to truly Know one's wife in such circumstances.

[whetstonefires]

you also see a variant of this formula a lot (generally at the more literary end of the fairy tale space) where it's not a creature you capture, but a magical lady who picks you for seemingly arbitrary reasons, bettering your fortune enormously with her magic and wealth and second-hand status.

and then, for reasons usually at least slightly less arbitrary, fucks off again.

the husbandly anxiety here is more about not having access to coercion as an option.

[creekfiend]

oooo yes absolutely!

[creekfiend]

was just talking to Story about this and he told me about one folktale where a guy meets a beautiful woman at a lake and she brings a bountiful dowry of like one million fat cows and such and she is of course a fairy so she's like "my one requirement in our bargain is that if you strike me three times I will leave" and in many versions of the story the husband doesn't ""actually"" strike her -- each time it's something like, one 'strike' involves her forgetting her gloves inside and he walks out and taps her on the shoulder with her gloves, but she tells him that counts as striking her. this sort of thing. which is TRANSPARENTLY like "whoa wouldn't it be fucked up if your wife could enforce consequences for behavior she said was harmful, even if according to your cultural norms it was fine, and you didn't see it as a big deal?" like... lol. what if women could actually be the ones who decided whether or not any given action their husbands took against them was harmful? IMAGINE... PREDEY SCARY....

[hollyhollie]

Look, Look at me. I also hate family guy. I also used to hiss when I heard the name seth MacFarlane because I hate family guy and he is family guy.

The orville is not family guy.

The orville is not family guy in space.

The orville is a love note to star trek .

The orville is wholesome

The orville says the future is full of hope and love

The orville says trans kids matter

The orville says strong women

Yes there are silly jokes in the orville; it does not detract from the genuine sci-fi beauty this show is, but rather, adds to it.

The orville says people are complex and can carry all range of emotions from dramatic to comedic

Go watch the orville.

[hollyhollie]

Laying here kicking my feet reading everyone in the notes recollect their The Orville experience. Yay!

[mourningkite]

I want them back :(

[hollyhollie]

Learned about the passenger pigeon the other day and am really sad now

[hollyhollie]

:'(

Passenger pigeon - Wikipedia

[hollyhollie]

Feelings i cant describe:

They apparently used to "darken the skies for days" when they migrated. Can you imagine.

If airplanes existed back then air traffic control would be fucked

They were in such a giant mass i think only deep sea scuba divers who've seen schools of giant fish could understand

They only survive in masses so they really don't have a chance of being found somewhere

I just. I dont even know.

The last one died alone in a cage

Fuck.

They DARKENED. THE SKIES. FOR DAYS.

What a magnificent spectacle of nature we will never see

They existed here. Before any of us. And now theyre just gone.

[hollyhollie]

Hi im not done

THIS MUST HAVE LOOKED LIKE A HIGHWAY IN THE SKY

Did nomadic tribes once follow these birds??? It would have been so easy.

Still upset we won't ever see this.

They were the most populated bird species in north America and 100 years later they're extinct. What could be next

[zechery-deactivated20220114]

Send me to Mars with party supplies before next august 5th

[thebaconsandwichofregret]

No guys you don’t understand.

The soil testing equipment on Curiosity makes a buzzing noise and the pitch of the noise changes depending on what part of an experiment Curiosity is performing, this is the way Curiosity sings to itself.

So some of the finest minds currently alive decided to take incredibly expensive important scientific equipment and mess with it until they worked out how to move in just the right way to sing Happy Birthday, then someone made a cake on Curiosity’s birthday and took it into Mission control so that a room full of brilliant scientists and engineers could throw a birthday party for a non-autonomous robot 225 million kilometres away and listen to it sing the first ever song sung on Mars*, which was Happy Birthday.

This isn’t a sad story, this a happy story about the ridiculousness of humans and the way we love things. We built a little robot and called it Curiosity and flung it into the star to go and explore places we can’t get to because it’s name is in our nature and then just because we could, we taught it how to sing.

That’s not sad, that’s awesome.

*this is different from the first song ever played on mars (Reach For The Stars by Will.I.Am) which happened the year before, singing is different from playing

[shadows-ember]

This is humanity

[siawrites]

Happy Birthday, Curiousity.

[labelleizzy]

Happy birthday, Curiosity.

[the-cimmerians]

Happy birthday, Curiosity.

[codenamewife]

Happy birthday, Curiosity!

[beentobeetle]

HAPPY BIRTHDAY CURIOSITY !!!!

[nickelmining101]

Happy birthday Curiosity!

[the-real-yahoo-mail]

Happy birthday, Curiosity!

[no-one-offical]

Happy Birthday, Curiousity!

[joy-and-whimsy-official]

Happy birthday, Curiosity!

[hollyhollie]

Learned about the passenger pigeon the other day and am really sad now

[hollyhollie]

:'(

Passenger pigeon - Wikipedia

[hollyhollie]

Feelings i cant describe:

They apparently used to "darken the skies for days" when they migrated. Can you imagine.

If airplanes existed back then air traffic control would be fucked

They were in such a giant mass i think only deep sea scuba divers who've seen schools of giant fish could understand

They only survive in masses so they really don't have a chance of being found somewhere

I just. I dont even know.

The last one died alone in a cage

Fuck.

They DARKENED. THE SKIES. FOR DAYS.

What a magnificent spectacle of nature we will never see

They existed here. Before any of us. And now theyre just gone.

[hollyhollie]

Learned about the passenger pigeon the other day and am really sad now

[hollyhollie]

:'(

Passenger pigeon - Wikipedia

[hollyhollie]

Learned about the passenger pigeon the other day and am really sad now

[hollyhollie]

Man if Bigfoot truthers and their kin focused on like, birds thought to be extinct instead of monster hunting I think they'd have slightly better luck

Like the GOAT who raises money to "search for the Loch Ness monster" and really hes just funding his lake biology research.

[plausible-fabulist]

I've got 99 problems and every one of them is a Luftballoon

[anundine]

yeah, sure, gimme another luftballoon. i'm not driving.

[tothechaos]

the thing they dont tell you about learning to "trust the process" is that you forget and relearn it every single time you make a new piece of art. unfortunately there is no cure either

[tothechaos]

a chart of what i mean for the visual learners in the audience

[hollyhollie]

Greatest honor bestowed upon a birder: your friends and family send you texts like this:

[hollyhollie]

Guess whos re-reading Emily Wilson's translation of The Odyssey

[hollyhollie]

Im having some fun with photoshop + my birding photos not fancy enough for Instagram

[hollyhollie]

I usually hate any kind of app-based activity tracking, but I gotta hand it to Wikipedia - these are the stats I care about.

Just normal summer reading