wsgy
15d ago
I just finished the last book in the Broken Earth Trilogy by N K Jemisin and feel compelled to ramble about it. The reason why I picked it up in the first place was I have been completely divorced from the state of modern sci fi/fantasy and was still under the impression that a Hugo award is a mark of quality. Each book in the trilogy won a Hugo, which is a first, so I was looking forward to it, and I checked all three from the library before going on a trip I knew would include a lot of downtime I'd rather not spend doomscrolling. It's very mediocre, not bad just kinda whatever, and had I done any digging at all into it or the state of the Hugos I should have known. From Wikipedia:
Jemisin's novel The Fifth Season was published in 2015, the first of the Broken Earth trilogy. The novel was inspired in part from a dream Jemisin had and the protests in Ferguson, Missouri about the death of Michael Brown.[27][28] The Fifth Season won the Hugo Award for Best Novel, making Jemisin the first African-American writer to win a Hugo award in that category.
So a black woman wrote a fantasy book about racism and quite literally black girl magic, and was rewarded handsomely for it by the Hugos (and had it optioned by Sony for 7 figures). In it, some people are gifted in orogeny, allowing them to manipulate the earth, and stop things like volcanoes and earthquakes. Someone who is skilled in this is really quite useful, but also obviously dangerous. As such, there's a class of people called Guardians who find new orogenes, and train them at Hogwarts in order to control them. If they try and run away or can't be controlled, they are killed. Normal people, by and large, hate them, and will try and kill them if discovered even if they have literally saved their communities in one way or another, and even if they are firmly under the yoke of the Guardians. They've even got their own slur. It's a bit... on the nose. Also a lot of characters are bisexual for some reason.
Again it wasn't a bad read. I'm not much of an anti-woke crusader myself; I find it mildly annoying when I realize what is going on, that's about it. But I was shocked it won a Hugo, and apparently they've been like this since like 2010?
Anyway I'm looking to read some dumb male-oriented sci fi if you guys have recommendations.
wsgy
16d ago
The short answer is probably the biological model of species distinction as "they can breed and make fertile offspring" is out of fashion. There are a few things to consider. For instance jackals and coyotes would never encounter each other in the wild so they don't hybridize. The animals also have pretty different patterns of behavior and ecological niches, at least wolves compared to the other two. Polar bears and Grizzlies can mate and make fertile offspring too, but they also rarely encounter each other in the wild to the point that we didn't know if they even could interbreed until someone saw a weird bear 20 years ago and tested its DNA. There's a bit of "the Categories were made for Man not Man for the Categories" going on here too. If I called a coyote a wolf I'd get called a dumbass in turn; they're obviously very different even just morphologically.
Actually now that I think a bit more about it it's a lot more of a historical inertia kind of thing. We gave them different names hundreds of years ago because they looked different and by the time we figured out they could make babies the names were entrenched.
wsgy
1mo ago
Jew is a slur or the proper terminology depending on how much stank is put on it. So it's one of those things that's a lot easier to parse the meaning of when spoken, less so over text. I'm completely unsurprised young people who primarily communicate via text rather than speech would be uncomfortable with Jew as a term
wsgy
1mo ago
I mostly lurk because I don't feel like I have much to contribute and everyone around here seems to know what they're talking about, or at least is good enough at rhetoric to fool me. And then I have this really bad habit of needing social approval in a way that downvotes cause me mental distress, even if I am positive I'm right. I'm kind of a coward online like that in a way that I am not irl.
And my study habits were probably unhealthy. I had a few friends in med school and was generally very well liked by people who knew me, but I had more than a few people say to me at some point in our 4th year "damn wsgy why weren't we better friends? You're a great hang!". I had kind of partied way too much in university and overcorrected. My (now) wife even mentioned what it was like to date me those first two years at our wedding. The rule was she could have me for an evening and overnight either Friday or Saturday and had a blanket invitation to stay over at my place on other days but I wasn't going to talk to her until 8pm and we had to be in bed by 10:30. Like she'd be hanging out on my couch watching TV while I ignored her with earplugs in my head. It got a laugh, appropriately.
I'm not actually too worried about the kids in the grand scheme of things. But it's like having one of your vital organs removed from your body and giving it a mind of its own. You can't help but get at least a bit neurotic about it getting damaged.
wsgy
1mo ago
When I was a first year in med school, staring at the sheer amount of knowledge I was supposed to cram into my brain, I would get too anxious and stressed out to even concentrate enough to study. So my girlfriend suggested I take some of her Xanax, which calmed me down enough that I could hit the books. The next day though I would have forgotten everything because as you know (and I had not yet learned at the time) benzos fuck with your hippocampus and it's harder to form memories. I did this three times before I recognized the pattern enough to bother googling it. So uh, don't do that.
What ended up working out for me was getting plenty of daily exercise. I was basically trying to study for 14 hours a day, then I'd watch a movie to unwind, then go to bed. Cutting that back to 13 hours of trying to study and one hour of exercise in the morning made me a lot less stressed out. And of course commiserating with people in the same boat as me. The worst thing you can do is not talk to your friends and colleagues about this.
Now, the thing that tends to stress me out the most is parenting. I am fully confident at times that I am fucking up my kids and they're going to need a lot of therapy in their mid-20s when they realize how much damaged my wife and I caused. But, and maybe this makes me look silly, I find the sycophantic nature of ChatGPT as well as its always available-ness is perfect for stopping me from spiraling.
Anyway: physician, heal thyself and so forth.
wsgy
3mo ago
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5 miles
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2 miles
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1/2 mile, corn, but it was in the news that they're getting bought by a housing developer
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5 miles
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1/2 mile
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I think like 50 miles. The regional airport flies direct to all the big international hubs though (10 miles)
wsgy
6mo ago
"In the interest of justice" is an idiomatic "term of art" in the US legal system. When you see it, the best way to think of it is dropping the case would create the most just outcome for all parties involved, including the wider population, but what exactly that means could be just about anything, including "prosecuting this may lead to right-wing racism against Somalian immigrants". It's my understanding that was more or less the idea with Rotherham, but we don't know if anything like that occurred here
wsgy
6mo ago
Yeah, counter-revolutionary also applies in France ~1800. Heretic was a big one in Europe, "secret Catholic" in England at one point, "witch" practically everywhere, communist, terrorist, enemy of the state, enemy of the people, monarchist... I'm pretty sure humans are hard wired to do this crap to each other
wsgy
6mo ago
Good question because I'm really racking my brain and can't think of anything good. I'm assuming you're asking about xenophobia in particular having moral weight attached to it instead of any kind of morality language being used to shut down discussion or malign enemies because examples of the the latter numbers in the thousands. The only example I can think of doesn't feel the same even if it's in the same ballpark. "Misobarbaros" was an ancient Greek word for someone who hated foreigners too much. But this was more a "stop making fun of the savages, they don't know any better like us superior Greeks" kind of a way, and even then it doesn't seem to have the same moral weight as 'racist' does today. And it wasn't so much about race as it was about culture, customs, and language, which presumably can be changed
That seems to be the pattern through history, that admonishment for anything approaching race-hatred would be like being critical of someone who hates children in a more modern setting, and even people who hate kids these days still get to keep their jobs
It's better than calling things Black [day of the week]
I mean look at this shit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Monday
Who knows what someone is talking about when they say Black Monday?
wsgy
9mo ago
So it's useful to ask what's the difference between those nameless Chicago politicians he's not going to pardon and Blago. Blago was on the Celebrity Apprentice and personally knows Trump, and declared himself a supporter. Would that be enough for you to pardon him? Maybe not, but Trump is easy to flatter and isn't going to take any hits politically for this action. It's a guy doing a solid for someone that was on his TV show that said he likes him, I don't think you need to go much beyond that
wsgy
9mo ago
“It was a sort of a terrible injustice,” Trump said. “They just were after him. They go after a lot of people. These are bad people, the other side.”
Sounds to me like Trump feels like Blago is a kindred spirit unjustly persecuted by his political enemies. I don't think it goes much beyond that but you could make the argument that he's sending a message about lawfare. Blago has said in the past that he's a "Trumpocrat" so he's a supporter
wsgy
9mo ago
my own brand of scrawl that's so bad even my own signatures don't look alike
Yeah that seems like it would be a problem. Here in the US when you vote they compare your signature on your ID with the one you put down on record at the ballot place. If it's insufficiently similar I assume that means they can tell you to take a hike or something
wsgy
9mo ago
What do young people's signatures look like?
Everyone I know has a signature based on cursive script, but apparently schools aren't teaching it anymore, so what do young folks do on forms? Just print their name and draw some stars around it like Krusty the clown? I remember hearing there was a high level of ballot curing in Nevada because "young people don't have signatures anymore" but idk what that even means. Or even more broadly, is bad penmanship going to create legal problems because nobody writes things down anymore, they just type them?
Friend, I don't like the sound of this at all.
I'm reading a whole lot of you offering compromises and trying to make this work, up to and including possibly sending yourself to the hospital from mental distress, and a big fat goose egg nothing on her end. This whole thing is completely lopsided. When you find some reasonable solution to her objections to moving to your town, she comes up with a new reason/excuse why she can't move to you. This sounds like she's stringing you along. You say you're terrified of losing her, and I believe you, but does she echo the same feelings? I doubt it. It doesn't sound like she cares about you enough to overcome any obstacles to more permanent physical proximity.
I don't like to say it, but I've seen this behavior before. It sounds like there are irreconcilable differences, but really I think she's stonewalling you, stringing you along in case something better falls in her lap. It's also much more common for women to be the ones pushing for more commitment and it sounds like your constant attempts to fix the situation is actually pushing her away. She should be wanting to have these conversations, not ending them with her latest excuse and letting you stew about it. I'm wondering what your friends' takes are on this. It's hard to see these things from the inside.
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