#auressea

[copperbadge]

Current Events Reading Reccs

I had a couple of people asking me about my “current events” reading in general (news aggregators, podcasts, etc) so I figured I’d just list them off here. 

I don’t read any tumblrs that are specifically focused on current events, I just kinda get news from various people I’ve followed, but I’ve found in general it helps to find people for whom the news is a hobby, not a consuming habit. I have communists and anarchists and prison abolitionists on my dash, but they aren’t people who have made that their identity, which removes the “You are insufferable” factor. So I guess find fandom weirdos with strong political views and follow ‘em. 

Also I want to state at the top that part of why I’m on top of shit that I get through Tumblr is that I have a policy of never reblogging or reacting to anything until I have 1. read the article being linked and 2. done my own research. This has saved me a vast deal of embarrassment, because sometimes I’ll save something outrageous to research and before I can even research it, it’s been rebutted. I cannot stress how important the process of reading and research is -- you can’t get your news from headlines and particularly not clickbait you see on Tumblr. 

As far as I know there’s no single tumblr clearinghouse for good high-level current events reporting and analysis (the analysis I think is a vital part) but if folks have resources they use, drop ‘em in the comments or reblogs.  

Anyway, some mailing lists I belong to are:

Quartz Daily Brief: finance and tech, mainly. Back when they were for-pay I paid for them, this newsletter was that entertaining. I believe they’ve now gone fee-free but they sometimes link to paywalls. I get it as an email newsletter, that’s just a link to the web version. 

Breakfast with ARTNews: Obviously a bit niche but I really like keeping up with the art world and they cover art crime too. The link is to the all-newsletters signup page, I only belong to Breakfast. 

The Futurist: This is the most insufferable nonsense masquerading as news ever. The ads are indistinguishable from the content. But it does help me keep a finger hard on the pulse of what irritating tech bros are into. Watch scams unfold in real time! 

I also follow a number of local interests -- community centers and neighborhood organizations primarily -- in Chicago, so those are always good to hunt up. Most major cities have a “citycast” podcast (just search “citycast [your city]” in your podcatcher) that is also good for local news.  

Some websites:

Longreads: Since longform.org went under, the best place to find the current longform pieces that everyone’s talking about.  

Brand Eating: Extremely niche, but I really love reading about “brand” food trends. It covers new food releases and sales and such in the areas of packaged food (potato chips, candy, etc), fast food, and casual dining. It’s also great as a resource for cheap eats. 

I stopped reading Bon Appetit recently (they ran this appallingly sympathetic story about a dickhead hiring manager) but like, honestly, if you want to track food trends, the BA email newsletter is kinda the way to go. If you’d like good food news in podcast form, I recommend The Sporkful (it’s in the podcast list). 

I used to read the Chicago Tribune, New York Times, and Fortune Magazine (which mostly scraped the not-awful stuff from Forbes) but I’ve cut it down to just the Trib; I don’t really need Fortune to keep me current and the NYT has morphed into a creepy proto-fash nightmare. The Trib has pretty good national/international coverage so if you don’t have a decent local paper it’s not bad, but I don’t know how much access you get as a nonpaying reader (I subscribe). 

Podcasts:

Quartz has a podcast, Quartz Obsession, which is off-and-on in terms of when episodes come out but very interesting when they do. 

Planet Money is a once-weekly podcast about economics, and has a daily show called “The Indicator” which is daily “small bites” current events coverage. 

The Late Show and the Daily Show both have an “ears edition” podcast that’s just the show audio; I’ve stopped listening for the most part but if you want good cultural commentary, that’s the place to go. 

The Journal by the Wall Street Journal is a weekly podcast focusing on one or two news stories, generally pretty relevant. 

Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me is a panel show but it’s a fun way to get bite-sized news you can look up later in more detail if you want. And it’s taped in Chicago! If you listen you can hear me in the audience laughing. :D (I’m going to another taping in a few weeks!) 

Behind The Bastards is actually a history podcast but if you’re listening current he does a bit of current-events commentary, and also I just really like it as a podcast.

Stuff You Should Know is a trivia podcast but they occasionally do current-events stuff.

The Sporkful is pretty good about current food news, although I run hot and cold on it.

I used to listen to a really good “professional” medical podcast, but it went full paywall when it started to offer certain forms of professional credit, so I found The House Of Pod as a very good free replacement. It’s not really for non-doctors, but as a non-doctor I still find it accessible and informative. (For medical history and curiosity, I do highly recommend Bedside Rounds, but I wouldn’t call it a current events cast.) 

So that’s how I get my news -- it’s not what I would call fully comprehensive but it’s reasonably informative! 

[qqueenofhades]

Okay – so! Thank you for all that you do for fandom and The History side of tumblr- it’s a LOT.

 I’m struggling with mapping a historical accuracy/fanon vs. canon concept. I hope you can help me untangle my thoughts on this.  Diverse representation in media is very important to me; and I’m also aware of the damage that the ‘colour-blind’ casting can do.  So! I’m trying to reconcile a common fandom perception that Hob Gadling is of South-East Asian decent.   (I know that Ferdie is!- I also have seen zero evidence that he claims Desi Diaspora as part of his identity. It makes me really uncomfortable that fandom might be projecting their desire for ‘Representation’ onto a man who lives outside his ancestral culture.)

What I do know is that Hob is a medieval freeman (?) from the south of England in the 1300s. I wonder at the possibility of his CHARACTER being of mixed race? I know that Briton and Europe and Africa were in trade. I know that People of colour moved freely around the continents!

  I’ve done some research into London population polls from the time, but I’m not certain of their degree of accuracy/usefulness.  They describe immigrants as ‘aliens’.. and most I’ve seen are European. I haven’t even come across evidence of Muslim or ‘Moorish’ people settling in London???!

The written history I’ve read tells me the Europeans didn’t establish trade with India until the mid 1400s. (How it’s possible they didn’t know about each other is Baffling and seems impossible??) Anyway. The crux of the matter is:  would Hob Gadling possibly been of mixed heritage?

I mean yes, technically, he COULD be. The most logical route for that would be to give him some family heritage from somewhere in Spain, or Iberia, which was a fully mixed-race society until well into the 13th/14th century, and was in regular trade and communication with England. The medieval Iberian Christian kingdoms of Castile-León, Aragon, and Navarre particularly were close trading partners and English/Iberian royalty married each other fairly often. It was somewhat less the case by the time Hob was born in the 1350s, but there is certainly enough previous contact to make it feasible. Muslims, Christians, and Jews all lived in Iberia (how much they all co-existed has long been one of the most debated questions in religious/historical studies), and Muslims had a presence in Spain for over 700 years, since the first arrivals in 711 CE following the collapse of the Umayyad dynasty in Baghdad, until their final expulsion under Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492.

The question, however, is if he SHOULD be headcanoned or identified as mixed-race, and while I am the least fandom-policey person ever and respect people's right to enjoy their own ideas in peace, it personally makes me a little uncomfortable. It feels related to the "fandom activism!" mindset where you should ship a more Morally Pure OTP, or your favorite is "better" if they can be somehow identified with a marginalized group, regardless of whether this fits or makes sense for the character. And in this case, Hob’s background as a good-looking white British bloke with an appropriately English-sounding name, as I describe him in AITWW, is central to both his character arc, his major mistakes, and how he has to learn and grow over time. It was absolutely vital to me that in AITWW, he had to explicitly confront the massive amounts of unearned privilege that he enjoyed over the centuries by being born into that body, and how it would be very different for him if he hadn't been. As his friend Julia puts it in their discussion in chapter 13, he had the luck to be born into a body that society automatically privileges and values and places into positions of power whether or not he deserves it, and as a black woman, she thinks immortality sounds absolutely awful. Why would she want to put up with the absolute shit it would be to live 600 years, at least in the Western world/America/Europe, in that embodiment?

Likewise, Hob agrees and admits that of course it's easy for him to want to live forever and maintain enthusiasm for life, because whatever difficulties he has faced, his race and gender have not contributed to them (which is the essence of white privilege in a nutshell). And of course, the urge to make him mixed-race might reflect some discomfort with his actual canon background and involvement in slavery, no matter if he obviously feels terribly guilty and driven to atone for over 200 years after that (as he SHOULD). In some sense, making him mixed-race might seem to mitigate that or give some reason to make him "sympathetic" while he was doing it, and frankly, I don't think 18th-century Hob deserves to get off the hook for being yet another British white man who might have felt bad about what he was doing at times, but continued to do it anyway. I'm not saying this is anyone's motive or intention, but it does trouble me, especially since Hob’s whiteness, the damage of that whiteness, and the way he has to deliberately and extensively unlearn that urge to just live life on easy mode regardless of the damage it does to others is what I find so interesting about his character. In short, if Hob was part of a racially marginalized group already, he might have made different choices, but he didn't, and now he is forced to literally live with that guilt and shame forever. He doesn't get to exonerate himself, and nor do I do it for him.

Lastly, I think this reflects a very modern and somewhat over-simplified way of thinking; to our modern and institutionally-racist-pickled brains, race is the chief category that can be explicitly constructed as Otherness, and doesn't reflect the very unclear way this was perceived and experienced in the 14th century. I.e., you note that immigrants to England "were mostly European" -- which is true, but does not reflect the dizzying array then as now, in which local, national, ethnic, and religious identities were constructed. One unattractive feature of the English national character over many centuries has been their hostility and distrust of foreigners, and this was especially the case in the 14th and especially late-14th, post-Black Plague society. For example, the Flemish were regarded as "morally inferior" since they ran several well-known brothels and red-light districts in Southwark, across the Thames from London (now part of the city), and that meant they were purveying immorality, rather than being there since the English desired their services. Xenophobia was especially rampant against "strangers" of any type, especially against Jews again post-Black Death for sadly predictable anti-Semitic reasons, and even being from continental Europe would not have made someone "English" in their eyes. Even by the Elizabethan era, it was almost impossible for a foreign-born citizen (or "denizen," meaning something akin to "permanent resident") to get licensed as a guildsman in the city of London, and without that license, you could not run a business, practice a trade, or engage in substantial paid work in any way.

Likewise, medieval notions of race were fluid, uncertain, and often linked to religion more than ethnic origin. There are several Arthurian legendarium reworkings, and epic poems such as The King of Tars, where the "happy" ending is that the mixed-race, Muslim, or black hero is converted to Christianity and abandons whatever untrue pagan religion he has been following before. This is often accompanied with a literal physical transformation turning him from black- or dark-skinned (impure) to white (pure). So yes, racial thinking and categories did exist, but it wasn't seen as fixed or unalterable, and again, wasn't really the first or primary way in which Otherness was constructed (compared to say, "Saracen," which functioned throughout almost the entire medieval era as a marker of difference and had varied racial, religious, sexual, and ethnic connotations, but originally came from the term for Muslims).

So anyway: hopefully that all makes sense and provides some context in both my historical and fandom thinking on the matter. Thanks for the question!

[ultraviolet-techno-ecology]

I love your idea of motivating yourself to do your fine-motor exercises! Great thinking!

I'd like to share/promote RAVEN Trust. I donated $100 last month. I wish I could do more. https://raventrust.com/ They help Indigenous people through many types of direct action.

I hope this sparks a creative Idea for you to use. You're out there doing the hard work!

Hell yeah! You get a raven for RAVEN. Okay that one was pretty obvious, and it looks more like a generic Birb, but seriously I thank you so much for giving me some motivation for my fine motor exercise, and for introducing me to this wonderful cause!

Want to know why I'm doing art? Click this link for my original post.

[evilwickedme]

Hi Gail! if you're still bored. I've been mulling the legitimacy of Unitarian Universalist use of Jewish text, quotes and philosophy as part of our faith traditions. UUs claim to be a multi-faith tradition- and we do have an amazing cross-section of folks from many backgrounds.. but I've been considering cultural appropriation a lot lately... I just read this quote on the UUA site:

2/2: "Many Unitarian Universalists (UUs) have a connection to Judaism. Whether we are ethnically, culturally, or spiritually Jewish, whether we're married to a Jewish person, or simply inspired by Jewish wisdom, we have a place in Unitarian Universalism. One of the six sources we draw upon in our worship and religious education is "Jewish and Christian teachings which call us to respond to God's love by loving our neighbors as ourselves."

ok ngl I’ve never heard of UU and I just googled it and I hate it so much already.

firstly. fucking. “Jewish and Christian teachings” no no no no. I - and so many other Jewish people on this platform and elsewhere - have talked at length about the issues regarding inflating Jewish and Christian traditions (often referred to as “Judeo-Christian values” 🤢🤮). this is antisemitic in a variety of ways. the first one is that there is barely anything in common between Judaism and Christianity. the second one is that Christians spent two thousand years persecuting Jewish people, often claiming that they were “the true Israelites” (don’t come at me but like... BHI I’m side eyeing you here) and basically both refusing to acknowledge our validity as a religion and hating us for existing first (and of course supposedly killing Christ and baby Christians and various other BS).

also, like, there is very little in common between the attitudes we have towards “God’s love”. I honestly hate Christianity’s attitude towards forgiveness so fucking much. You don’t need to make up for what you did. You don’t need to apologize. You just need to really regret it in front of a priest or whatever and then it’s done. (I think this might be a mostly Catholic thing right now, but only Christians think that Catholics aren’t Christians, and also, like, that attitude still prevails in Christian attitudes in general, even if they don’t specifically go to confession anymore). also just, “old testament God” - fuck that attitude. that shit is the most antisemitic thing. our God isn’t angry and vindictive all of the time, he’s just more complex, and needs humans as much as we need him.

this is a lot of tangent to say that I hate that entire conflation.

I also just really hate that whole “many UUs have a connection to Judaism”... you are not Jewish if you only have a “spiritual” connection to Judaism (whatever the fuck that means) and you’re definitely not Jewish if you’re “inspired by Jewish wisdom”. that’s bullshit of the highest order. that’s cultural appropriation that’s honestly on the level of Rachel Dolezal. the Jewish people are real. our religion and our ethnic identity are linked. and you cannot join us without us agreeing for you to join us. it’s a complicated process.

also, Jewish tradition and religious law specifically forbids this kind of combined worshipping. it is essentially worshipping false/other gods, especially if you combine it with Christianity, which inherently worships Jesus, someone who is not, at all, according to any tradition that isn’t Christian, God.

actually, let’s just be clear - this whole think stinks of cultural Christianity. people who believe that they can combine these inherently separate traditions because Christianity envelops everything.

if you want to be Jewish, please, go to the nearest synagogue, talk to a rabbi, figure out if this really works for you. but don’t take like this and assume you have any right to it. you don’t. and honestly, Jewish people who are participating in this, if there are in fact any, are total shandes.

[amysnotdeadyet]

assumptions! I assume you are over 40.. because we have many social/cultural interests in common.

You are correct! I’m 46, for now.

[prismatic-bell]

auressea replied to your post: Serious question: do I have any gardeners?

Garlic is one of those plants that have LOCAL Preferences! so you gotta find out how garlic likes to be planted in your region. here in PNW- at least 10 cm deep in the soil, but loose soil! the less clay the better. If it’s deep cold where you are, they might not make it if you plant them out now.

I live in Phoenix, LOL.

But we have a yard that’s more ant nest than yard (that’s . . . not uncommon here), and the ants here fucking bite, so I’ll be doing the pot-to-bucket thing and using all purchased potted dirt. It’s how most sane gardeners in this area roll.

[heatherwitch]

Hullo! wondering if you can confirm the date of Samhain this year? I'm getting confusing mixed signals from the great Interwebs. I think it's meant to be Nov 7th?

I’m not sure to be honest! The energy for me feels strongest around Halloween, so that’s when I celebrate it (if I do, but this year I don’t have the time or spoons for it). Sorry I couldn’t be more help!

[vaspider]

Hey- I've noticed you're doing an incredible amount of mental and emotional labour defending queers and our right to self-identify. I want to THANK you profusely- I started doing this a year ago, and burnt out. I couldn't sustain it. I think you are incredibly brave and strong. I hope you've got people you can lean on for support. And please rest if you need to?

I am Summer Court. I am righteous Wrath. I live by fighting. I hold my fire close. 

Thank you for witnessing me. I have an incredibly supportive family, including the beautiful @dadhoc and the gorgeous @apocalycious. I think I’m going to go eat a food and watch a Project Runway.