everything happens too much

I'm very slow at reading right now sadly and have piles of unread cool books. Which makes reading book reviews about things I haven't read a bittersweet experience, because so many of them are also cool, and I really cannot justify starting and then getting distracted away from even more books right now. I haven't read either of these, but they sound super neat.

Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon

A book that focuses on commodity flows – grain, lumber and meat – does not sound enticing. But Cronon’s insights into the troubled relationship between a city and its hinterland are revelatory. We learn how the rise of Chicago in the late 19th century created social and environmental havoc, with effects that are still felt to this day. Chicago is the crucible for Cronon’s analysis, but his thinking is pertinent to an understanding of the hidden forces at work in any contemporary city.

A book about commodity flows sounds fantastic actually, but then I am into fantasy worldbuilding.

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino

Marco Polo reports to an increasingly sceptical Kublai Khan on the cities he has seen while travelling the world. This is Calvino at his alchemical best. As one brief portrait follows another we are forced, in ways miraculous, to reflect on our own behaviour as members of a society. The cities’ construction may be fantastical, but each portrait flags up uncomfortable contemporary truths. A favourite of mine is Penthesilea. It has no centre and no end: “outside Penthesilea does an outside exist? Or, no matter how far you go from the city, will you only pass from one limbo to another, never managing to leave it?”

(via Top 10 books about building cities)
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Side note: i) A blog is basically an open notebook right? ii) I have a bookmark folder of links to books that sound cool and many word documents of book lists but I'm trying a new way to keep track. iii) Why did I have to be both the person who finds everything interesting and the one who wants to reread the things I like over and over?And the one whose brain is full of static this past year and doesn't have the energy to focus on much?

Dark Patterns.
Dark Patterns are "tricks used in websites and apps that make you buy or sign up for things that you didn't mean to" and there is a fascinating gallery of examples on the site, from misleadingly labelled buttons to very obfuscated site design. As with questionnaire design and statistics reporting, the aspect I immediately gravitate to when learning about something is its potential for manipulation.

Pankaj Mishra: Watch This Man. A book review for Civilisation: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson (LRB, 2011).
I've read and hated and argued against this book in class, and I wish I'd known Mishra's concise rebuttal back then. Lots of good references.

The slave-trading, self-commemorating European conquerors of Asia and Africa, Naipaul writes, ‘could do one thing and say something quite different because they had an idea of what they owed to their civilisation’. Ferguson, a retro rather than revisionist historian, tries to summon up some of that old imperial insouciance here. Consequently, his book is immune to the broadly tragic view – that every document of civilisation is also a document of barbarism – just as it is to humour and irony.

China Mieville: On Social Sadism (Salvage, 2015).
I'm pretty sure I was googling for articles on social murder instead when I stumbled across this article and got distracted. Serious content warning for descriptions of police brutality, torture, murder, racism, casual cruelty; but it attempts to pull together many threads I was aware of separately but not in juxtaposition. Something to think about.

David Wallace-Wells: The Uninhabitable Earth, Annotated version (Intelligencer, 2017). // Laurie Laybourn-Langton, Lesley Rankin, Darren Baxter: This is a crisis: Facing up to the age of environmental breakdown (IPPR, 2019).
Two overviews of research on climate change. I'm assuming Wallace-Well's 2019 book of the same title is even more comprehensive and up-to-date, but I haven't got it yet, and the article makes for chilling but lucid reading. The IPPR report focuses a bit more on socioeconomic impact.

There's apparently a prompt list of awkward romcom prompts! My favourite type of romcom tbh.

This month's fest is all about the humor and tragedy of awkwardness. While a "meet cute" is a scene where two characters are introduced in an adorable, cute, funny, charming way, a "meet ugly" is a scene where your characters encounter each other in a horrible, unfortunate, unflattering way. (and still manage to like each other!)

I'm not going to sign up because I'm still working on that one genprompt_bingo prompt, three months later, but I had a ton of fun reading through the various prompts and having ideas and maybe somebody else is interested?

(via allbingo)

( some prompts I liked under the cut )

The Metafilter tag for OuLiPo
I know, I'm linking a site for linking sites in a linkspam, but I'd never heard of OuLiPo before and so this is more about the breadth of the concept instead of a specific example, if that makes sense. OuLiPo is short for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Literature), seeking to create and incorporate restrictive techniques and methods into their writing, and I fucking love restrictive techniques in writing. (Actually I've been meaning to read Georges Perec's La Disparition, a novel without words that have the letter 'e', for years now, and apparently he was a member of Oulipo, which just goes to show I should stop piling ever more books onto my 'to read' pile....) The restrictions I'm most used to are the easy ones, length rules like 100 words or 3 sentences, but I'm excited to see what else is out there.

Kate Crawford: Can an Algorithm Be Agonistic? Ten Scenes about Living in Calculated Publics
Social science buzzwords galore, but that is what I'm studying. I was at a talk by Annelie Pentenrieder about social practices when using navigation software, and the aspect I found most fascinating was the concept of 'data doubles' ("the conversion of human bodies and minds into data flows that can be figuratively reassembled for the purposes of personal reflection and interaction"[1]. One example would be Amazon recommendations: when you look at them you can guess at the assumptions about you their algorithm makes), and linked to the concept of data doubles, users trying to observe their data double, guessing the behaviours that influence it and changing them for their own ends, 'gaming' the algorithm. Her example was a Deliveroo food delivery biker who used to ride fast, noticed he was offered the less lucrative long-distance deliveries, and then decided to drive much slower. In a similar vein, there used to be this tip of copying the job advert in tiny white text onto your resumee when applying for jobs online, or having a bot automatically search random stuff so you obscure your 'true' self with garbage data.
When researching, I came across Crawford's talk, which is a pretty good framework for looking at the process, and 'agonistic' is one of my favourite political science concepts because I'm deeply suspicious of consensus and technocracy. (A non-jargon introduction to Mouffe's agonistic pluralism is the Guardian Longreads article The death of consensus: how conflict came back to politics).

Hi! I'm still getting used to all this

[ETA 2019-03-08: un-stickied]

Preamble: Runaways 'verse is a series about the big "what if" of Maul and Savage's relationship: what if Savage had started from a slightly more equal position and been able to redefine their relationship? The middle installment Riches and Wonders was the first time I genuinely focused on Savage's interiority, and when sl_walker asked me ask meme questions about it on tumblr, I spent a week drafting a long ramble-slash-meta about Savage and his relationship with Maul, preserved here for posterity.
( Read more... )