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oh? 👀

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That ao3 ship list has terrible methodology. The numbers are a weird composite score based on all sorts of stuff, rather than an actual count of fic. Plus, the creator insists on all sorts of bizarre labels, like that Hermione from Harry Potter is of ambiguous ethnicity. The list is made of wank, only suitable for producing more wank.

Oh the Hermione thing is because she's black in...whatever's the play called, or something, right? I do not exactly think it is accurate to how the overwhelming majority of fanfic that has her as part of the main couple describes (lol) but the logic makes sense from the perspective of the sort of person who assembles these lists.

Sad to hear about the methodology though. It was nice precisely knowing how out of touch with Tumblr at large I was.

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Everyone clap for non consensual body modification everybody loves a character whose body has been altered against their will

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There's some ancient kontextmachine post about how the stereotypical millennial relationship was going to be variably neurotic high-achieving girlboss and charmingly underachieving guy with a variety of cute hobbies and, while you do under no circumstances have to hand it to him, this track to my actual social circles better than any other gender stereotype I can think of lol.

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positioning 'competence' in this sense as a (the, even!) gendered, masculine trait does both make me see red on an ideological level and, uh-

Let's say it doesn't exactly track with the majority of successful straight relationships I'm directly familiar with?

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I mean the actual thing that might make straight young men progressive is that anglosphere conservatives legitimately seem to be drinking the koolaid on the whole banning porn thing. But that's probably not to be relied upon.

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On the abstract level I do actually wholeheartedly agree that it would be good to have some more lifestyle and dating advice and whatever stuff targeted at straight men that isn't at least fash-curious. Ideally with ever so slightly more subtlety and grace than pulling out a bullhorn and screaming 'HELLO EVERYONE WE ARE AUDITIONING FOR WOKE JOE ROGAN PLEASE FORM A QUEUE' but like sure. The gender crosstabs on polling for 18-25s are well into 'start throwing shit at the wall and see what sticks' territory.

On the object level it's probably just best if I never actually try to read any of them though. The urge to publicly mock all the incoherent bullshit probably isn't very helpful to the political project.

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Stereotypical evil fantasy cult to a dark god but it becomes increasingly obvious that it is 1:1 based on Tokugawa-era conspiracy theories about evil Christian sorcerers

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I'm hoping this anti-porn movement gets rolled back, but if we have to settle in for the long haul, Tumblr is actually very well-situated for it, not just because we had our porn apocalypse ages ago but because this site is full of people who are horny but don't actually have sex, and fully sublimate their sexuality into unrecognizable abstractions and symbolism

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Mirror universe st-just who reblogs a bunch of aesthetic pictures of dressing tables with mirrors and tags them #vanity reblog

this is such a good idea for bit it allmost makes me want to develop informed opinions on furniture styles.

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2025 Book Review #34 – Drive Your Plow Over The Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk, trans. Antonia Lloyd-Jones

Some time ago I asked for recommendations for non-English literature with decent translations, and I believe this was one of the titles people sent me from it. Which is a guess, because when I at long last got around to it, I had absolutely zero idea what I was in for. Trying to piece together what genre a book is as you read it always adds some interest to the experience – not that this book lacked for things to puzzle over. Despite the short length, I found it a difficult read to really get into – but when I did, it was an odd but mostly charming sort of...pseudo-mystery, I suppose?

Set in a rural plateau in Poland near the Czech border, the story follows Janina – an elderly woman who spends her winters keeping an eye on the empty cottages around her for their wealthy owners, her summers teaching English classes at the small village school, and every hour she can on her twin passions of translating Blake into Polish and furthering her own studies of astrology. Then one midwinter evening her neighbour – a vulgar man and a poacher few would miss – turns up dead. Over the next year, she finds herself at the periphery of one murder after another, and increasingly convinced she knows what’s happening – that the much-oppressed animals of the forest taking their vengeance upon humanity. But despite her best efforts to alert the authorities, no one seems interested in taking the theories of a sickly, superstitious old woman seriously – and yet, pillars of the community continue to die under very mysterious circumstances.

This is a novel that lives and dies on the personality of its narration – a very close first-person stream of consciousness, full of words like Ailments and Deer being capitalized for significance, sprawling tangents about astrology and personal anecdotes with dubious relevance to events at hand, and an absolute insistence on referring to each character only by the nickname that seemed appropriate to Janina when she first met them. The effect is, I think, intentional, but I found it did make it difficult for me to really get sucked into the book – but when I forced myself to make the effort, it was pretty charming. I can’t imagine retaining the effect when translating to English was anything but a headache, but in general I have absolutely no complaints.

The odd narration rubs your face in it, but just generally there’s something kind of fascinating about reading a book with the protagonist and her best friends are hobbyist translators in translation. In translation to the language they are translating things out of, even! There’s a section that goes into some detail about the difficulties of translating a specific stanza of Blake into Polish while keeping its rhythm and lists several different attempts they made which hurt my head a bit to parse reading and must have been absolute hell to translate. It’s easily one of my favorite passages of the whole book.

Linguistic matters aside, this is very much a Polish book, and one written in the previous generation (that is, the early 2000s). The collapse of the People’s Republic is distant enough to rarely be mentioned, but the cultural fallout is everywhere – and the fact that the rich and powerful are precisely those who transitioned seamlessly from communism to catholic capitalism informs a great deal of how much trust and respect Janina gives them. The west – even just the Czech Republic over the border – is imagined as a soft, rich land of milk and honey, and the European Union with its directives and authorities is a novelty people embrace wholeheartedly or are frustrated trying to understand. It’s all quite fascinating.

The story is structured like a bit of a classic mystery, though lacking any great detective to bypass the bumbling police and solve it all in an afternoon. Though it becomes increasingly clear that the only thing keeping the reader from solving it is the unfocused and unreliable narration, and even then it’s fairly easy to guess from quite early on. I suppose thriller is the more accurate genre? But it’s never exactly thrilling either. I guess it ends up as just ‘fiction’, if you want to be strict about these things?

The book is, thematically, very concerned with the dichotomy of natural and human – or, properly, it is very concerned with the messy edges where the bright line between them becomes hard to see. Hunters that pride themselves on being responsible stewards of the wilderness, while leaving out bags of feed to lure their prey into convenient shooting angles. Forests for whom human management is load-bearing to keep the whole ecosystem from collapsing or being overrun with parasites. Foxes selectively bred for the luster of their fur, totally incapable of surviving in the wild. Scientists who spend their lives carefully cataloguing species of beetles who only barely interact with civilization at all – you get the idea. I’m not sure quite what, if anything, the book’s real thesis is about the subject, but it certainly dwells upon it.

Well, that’s not true. Even beneath the unreliable narration and the character of the protagonist, the text does have a palpable distaste for hunting (or, at least, the safe and comfortable version of it done with high powered rifles from pulpits, with meat and drink in a well-appointed lodge to celebrate afterwards), and does possess a real sympathy for the casual cruelty with which the natural world is so often treated.

Which is of a piece with its perspective on society. It’s not an accident that the hero of the story is an elderly woman whose career was cut short by disability and cannot bear to live in the city. The – not even sympathy – the interest of the book is with those on the margins of society, and the how the great and the good overlook and disregard them even when they really, really shouldn’t.

The marketing copy calls this book a fairy tale, and maybe that’s not wrong. There’s a deeply, instinctively satisfying catharsis to seeing the pride and carelessness of the powerful punished in some poetic matter. The very fact that it’s so rare gives the occasions where it does happen a sense of being judgment from on high, the slow to arrive but perfect and final justice of the stars. Maybe that’s what the book is about, at least as much as anything else. Janina would certainly think so.

This isn’t a read I found very easy, but it’s the rare one I’ve actually grown to appreciate a great deal more in the course of writing a review for. If it sounds interesting, I’d thoroughly recommend it.

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There was never going to be a world where the Internet was good

Honestly the internet has been such an unambiguous and incredibly dramatic positive influence on my personal life that even understanding some of the real issues (e.g. genocide in Myanmar) the idea that anyone could tally up the profits and losses and not consider it a massive win for humanity remains very strange to me.

Like this isn't an carefully considered position, to be clear. But it is a deeply felt one.

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Culture is the best it's ever been. People are just succumbing to boomer brainrot

I feel like "Culture" might be a slightly underdefined term here lol.

But broadly I tend to agree. At least in the sense that, whatever mass culture's myriad failings, the remaining glories of the internet mean it remains easier than ever before to a) find a tiny fragment of a subculture of freaks who match your vibe or b) engage with the millenia-long back catalog of humanity.

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Whats the opposite of a girlboss. Im like a girlfailure

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it is really funny that people are surprised that there are indians in africa, like for all everyone invokes gandhi nobody seems familiar with his actual life? and south asian indentured labour was taken both east and west across the british empire? and also indians migrate everywhere? some of the largest diaspora in the world? literally not sure there's any major country in the world where we don't turn up.

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Facebook: we analysed your entire internet history, tracked your location and took a deep dive into your personal relationships, and we’ve decided to recommend you this specific conditioner that you also saw in your local Tesco two days ago, aint that neat!

Tumblr: HEY sHITHEAD *slurring words* how would you like to buy  *throws dart* a gym membership for your *spins wheel* pARROT