A History of the World in Admin - I am now a professional administrator, and this is spot on about both the vital importance of administration, and the reasons why privileged (mostly) white (predominantly male) people don't understand that, and why that's one of the pieces in the Brexit clusterfuck jigsaw.
(I also encountered a classic example of this in the wild recently, in the shape of a flowchart for a new process which said "HR will do X", as if HR was a magic thing that just happened and not made up of already-busy people who might not be able to find time to do X on top of all the things they already have to do.)
SFF knitting fans may like this pattern for Jedao gloves, inspired by Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire.
I was very sad to hear of Jeremy Hardy's death last week, as he was one of my very favourite comedians (and possibly the one I've seen live the most times, which is some consolation). Of all the tributes and obituaries, I did like this one by Mark Steel, though you do have to put up with the Independent's appallingly ad-heavy site to read it.
John Crace's account of living with anxiety struck a lot of chords with me.
This advice column from Autostraddle, How Do I Tell If I'm A Butch Cis Woman Or A Trans Non-Binary Person?, was really, really helpful as I continue my ongoing process of trying to work out whether I'm uncomfortable with femaleness per se or just femininity. (I was particularly struck by "dysphoria isn’t the exclusive domain of trans people — it’s entirely valid and actually quite common for a cis person to feel uncomfortable in their body", which has shifted everything into a much clearer focus.)
Ellen Kushner's short story The Duke of Riverside is part-prequel part-sequel to Swordspoint, and made me really want to read the other books in the series.
Arkady Martine's The Hydraulic Emperor is a fabulous story about collecting and sacrifice and what the far, far future of cinema could look like.
For![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
the_comfortable_courtesan and her fans, How the Pre-Raphaelites became obsessed with the wombatt.
How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans is a good summary of the rise of the TERFs, and the links between anti-trans ideology and colonialism. (This Twitter thread on TERFism as one of many gateways to white supremacy makes a similar point. Basically, Pterry had it right; evil begins when you start to treat people as things. It doesn’t matter so much which group of people you decide are less than human because they’re different from you somehow, it’s always the first step on the same road.)
The author of this article on depictions of Queen Anne's body seems to think that Sellar and Yeatman's depiction of Queen Anne as dead all the time was their own invention, rather than being an obvious application of their "all the history you can remember" approach to the idiom "and Queen Anne's dead", but is otherwise an interesting look at the subject.
Pixar's sweet new short film Purl looks at sexism in the workplace from the point of view of Purl, an animated ball of yarn.
(I also encountered a classic example of this in the wild recently, in the shape of a flowchart for a new process which said "HR will do X", as if HR was a magic thing that just happened and not made up of already-busy people who might not be able to find time to do X on top of all the things they already have to do.)
SFF knitting fans may like this pattern for Jedao gloves, inspired by Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire.
I was very sad to hear of Jeremy Hardy's death last week, as he was one of my very favourite comedians (and possibly the one I've seen live the most times, which is some consolation). Of all the tributes and obituaries, I did like this one by Mark Steel, though you do have to put up with the Independent's appallingly ad-heavy site to read it.
John Crace's account of living with anxiety struck a lot of chords with me.
This advice column from Autostraddle, How Do I Tell If I'm A Butch Cis Woman Or A Trans Non-Binary Person?, was really, really helpful as I continue my ongoing process of trying to work out whether I'm uncomfortable with femaleness per se or just femininity. (I was particularly struck by "dysphoria isn’t the exclusive domain of trans people — it’s entirely valid and actually quite common for a cis person to feel uncomfortable in their body", which has shifted everything into a much clearer focus.)
Ellen Kushner's short story The Duke of Riverside is part-prequel part-sequel to Swordspoint, and made me really want to read the other books in the series.
Arkady Martine's The Hydraulic Emperor is a fabulous story about collecting and sacrifice and what the far, far future of cinema could look like.
For
the_comfortable_courtesan and her fans, How the Pre-Raphaelites became obsessed with the wombatt.How British Feminism Became Anti-Trans is a good summary of the rise of the TERFs, and the links between anti-trans ideology and colonialism. (This Twitter thread on TERFism as one of many gateways to white supremacy makes a similar point. Basically, Pterry had it right; evil begins when you start to treat people as things. It doesn’t matter so much which group of people you decide are less than human because they’re different from you somehow, it’s always the first step on the same road.)
The author of this article on depictions of Queen Anne's body seems to think that Sellar and Yeatman's depiction of Queen Anne as dead all the time was their own invention, rather than being an obvious application of their "all the history you can remember" approach to the idiom "and Queen Anne's dead", but is otherwise an interesting look at the subject.
Pixar's sweet new short film Purl looks at sexism in the workplace from the point of view of Purl, an animated ball of yarn.
