wednesday linkspam

and we're back, dammit! The house has air conditioning that works again, I have no massive terrifying looming deadlines, and I'm going to use Wednesday to share links I have open in my tabs. Among other things.

From around DW

Via rachelmanija: Debunking food, fatness and fitness myths

I would like your best recs for in-depth articles, studies, or books on the most cutting-edge current knowledge about nutrition, body weight, and health.

greywash has been killing it: On mourning, transformative works, and audience manipulation (CW: suicide)

And look. If someone comes into my fandom and writes a story where the character I most relate to dies in a way I find tone-deaf, oppressive, and clueless, I'm sure as hell not going to take that death on board as part of my personal mythology. I'm probably going to get really, really mad; drink some whiskey; drag the author extensively in Discord; write like four Dreamwidth rants where I deconstruct all the bullshit arguments the author was making that I found tone-deaf, oppressive, and clueless; and then write my own goddamned fanfic giving their fanfic all the middle fingers I can muster in a deeply passive-aggressive, naming-no-names sort of way. [...]

But I'm not going to read that story and go into mourning for the death of my avatar character. Why the hell should I? What does that death count? It doesn't even have the (lbr, since I'm a fanfic writer in the first place, to me faaairly spurious) gloss of being "the original source." It's not the fucking original source! It's just some other jerkoff, howling into the void about characters that someone else made up!! They say "he dies"; I say, "hold my beer." Transformative works are transformative works, guys. If they can kill him off, I can bring him back. Why the hell should their version matter more?

via tzikeh: Avengers: Endgame

I’m not mad at the movie per se; I’m mad about the narrative construct employed by pretty much any movie/show/insert-form-of-storytelling-here that the death of one or more main characters (especially The Grand Sacrifice For All Humanity) is the only option in a high-stakes situation–anything else, and the payoff is just not enough, somehow. There is no closure without death? That’s a pretty terrible position for storytellers to take.

Over here, siderea brought me a fantastic little discussion from this NPR piece on taxon-specific bias in animal behavior. You can find the paper that Dr. Rosenthal mentions writing in the NPR piece available open-access here, if you want to read more.

One of the things his work really raises for me is the question of what this research is really for. What are we trying to know, and why?

For instance, if why we, like, as a species, are studying the behavior of other organisms because we want to know what the full range of possibilities are - possibly to contextualize and inform human behavior - then, yes, lack of coverage is a problem. The question of what all those under- or un-studied beetles are up to becomes important, and science should get on that.

Via staranise: Children and the prodigies we make of them

That, and the idea that white people see our children as gardens to cultivate more than people to raise, which—we do. When my 1yo nephew SHRIEKED all through dinner, and everyone at the dinner table winced, I joked, "Ah, future operatic tenor." When my brother's kids earn money and save up for a big LEGO train, we say, "Future entrepreneurs here." We're preparing kids for a competitive world where every early advantage can translate into tens of thousands of dollars lost, into opportunities missed, lives derailed.

It's that age-old question: At what point does adequately preparing a child for an abusive and cutthroat world in itself constitute abuse? At what point does failing to do so constitute neglect?

Generally interesting

An Evolutionary Psychology Quiz

How do we know evolutionary psychology is perfectly legitimate? Well, for starters, it has not one but two science terms in its name. And furthermore, it’s just common sense: Homo sapiens evolved in a vicious, winner-take-all state of nature, and therefore the deepest, realest elements of human psychology are hardwired, brutal, and individualistic. The false trappings of “civilization” came later, and overlaid our natural psychology with everything about us that’s gentle, feminine, decadent, shallow, cosmopolitan, unnatural, and legalistic. Anyone who attempts to call this “sexist,” “pure ideology,” “vaguely anti-Semitic,” or “extremely convenient” just doesn’t understand science.

Here’s a quiz to test your knowledge of evolutionary psychology. Please keep in mind that evolutionary psychology employs different standards of proof than the hard sciences. These standards are unfalsifiable, and therefore cannot be questioned.

Inside the Growing World of Queer Truckers

In an industry dominated by white men, queer people are finding a community on the road.

I wrote the book on user-friendly design. What I see today horrifies me.

The world is designed against the elderly, writes Don Norman, 83-year-old author of the industry bible Design of Everyday Things and a former Apple VP.

Excellent additional commentary via vassraptor here.

Less of a question, more of a comment... (comes with a list of The Worst Questions in ascending order of sin)

If you attend panels or presentations, ever, I need you to read this article because, best case scenario, I need you to help protect me from “less of a question, more of a comment” guy. Worst case scenario, you are “less of a question, more of a comment” guy. Let’s talk about panels in general, panels about diversity and identity topics in particular, and how you as an audience member can make choices and ask questions which improve that experience for both panelists and audience. I’ll also answer some questions we both did and didn’t get to at PAX East’s “Designing Asian Settings and Themes in Analog Games” panel.

What ‘Guardians’ Director James Gunn Learned From High-Profile Firing

My apparatus for being loved was my work, and being famous. I had never really experienced before that feeling of being loved so deeply. It has been a problem for me in relationships, in friendships; I can experience loving another person but I have a very difficult time experiencing being loved. In that moment, the apparatus which was my only hope for feeling love was torn away from me and I had absolutely nothing. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.

And then came this outpouring of real love. [...] That amount of love that I felt from my friends, my family, and the people in the community was absolutely overwhelming. In order for me to have fully felt that love for the first time, the thing that needed to happen was the apparatus by which I was feeling falsely loved had to be completely taken away.

Scabby the Rat Is Under Attack—And Needs Our Help

The Trump era presents unions with a range of new threats to their survival, including the 2018 Janus Supreme Court decision revoking the right of public sector unions to collect dues from nonmembers. This erosion of union protections is being met with large-scale protests and grassroots organizing, from picketing school teachers to striking ride-share drivers. But as battles over union rights transpire at the local and federal levels, an unexpected figure has come into focus: a giant inflatable rodent.

In the late 20th century, Scabby the Rat was popularized in the industrial Midwest and grew into a symbol of union solidarity, showing up at protests around the country and the world. Standing as large as 25 feet tall with an aggressive facial expression, claws ready to fight and a stomach covered in inflamed scabs, Scabby is an effective tactic to force negotiation and draw media coverage while shaming those who violate strikes. The rat’s continued effectiveness is a testament to the importance of workplace organizing, particularly in an era of historically low union participation.

Is gender unique to humans?

This summer, in the introductory course I teach on the evolution and biology of human and animal behavior, I showed my students a website that demonstrates how to identify frog "genders." I explained that this was a misuse of the term "gender"; what the author meant was how to identify frog sexes. Gender, I told the students, goes far beyond mere sex differences in appearance or behavior. It refers to something complex and abstract that may well be unique to Homo sapiens. This idea is nothing new; scholars have been saying for decades that only humans have gender. But later that day I began to wonder: Is it really true that gender identity is totally absent among non-human species—even our closest evolutionary relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos?

Things I keep reading in small bites and then darting away from

Autistic burnout: The cost of masking and passing

Being an autistic seen as “high-functioning” means having your identity doubted and questioned. Exhausting efforts to pass and mask are given little credit. They are tossed aside with an “I do that too” and held against us in those moments of meltdown and burnout when we can longer pretend at neurotypicality. The rewards for passing are the familiar ableist tropes of invisible disability and the expectation to keep on passing, forever.

Access intimacy: the missing link

Access intimacy is that elusive, hard to describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs. The kind of eerie comfort that your disabled self feels with someone on a purely access level. Sometimes it can happen with complete strangers, disabled or not, or sometimes it can be built over years. It could also be the way your body relaxes and opens up with someone when all your access needs are being met. It is not dependent on someone having a political understanding of disability, ableism or access.

got no roots, but--my home's not on the ground

A friend of mine asked for good retellings of fairy stories for a D&D campaign she's working on this week, and I dove headlong with great glee into T. Kingfisher's short stories. (Well, and her novels, but the short stories are easier to link, and I like people to buy her books if they get a taste from the stories.) Which got me thinking about witches in stories, both hers and Terry Pratchett's which are clearly influenced. My character in the campaign I'm in with my friend is an older woman in service to Death, and she's a little sillier than the archetype of those witches, but not so far unlike them.

Except that she doesn't have a settled, single place she lives. I wrote her as a traveler, someone who gets itchy if she's still too long, partly to explain why she was happy living on the road with an adventuring party, and partly...

...well. Partly because I don't get to set down roots. I've lived in Austin seven years, and I lived in northern Virginia for eight, and aside from that I've never been in a city for more than three or four at a stretch. And I'm set to be moving again in a year or two, because that's how this job goes. My dad was a military brat, and his feet got itchy, I think; but more than that, in the world I live in and the world I grew up in in North America, you move to go where the jobs are. I remember starting a in high school history course and my teacher asked how many of us were born in Georgia, and perhaps two people in a twenty-odd person class raised their hands. (I'd lived in Georgia two years then.)

I think some of the magical realism from those characterizations of witches and witchcraft comes from being part of the earth of a specific place, of being born somewhere and knowing it in your bones and so forth, and drawing the kind of power that comes from knowing many people for a very, very long time, being a known quantity in your community. But, well. Migration patterns across hundreds of miles have been common in many families for a long time in North America. Immigrant narratives are a huge part of our national mythos--if I recall rightly, about half of white Americans descend from immigrants who arrived after 1850--and even if you only look at patterns of movement within North America, well, my ancestors are Irish Catholics; if you look at Irish-American history, there's an awful lot of movement across the northern borders, and there's an awful lot of moving around the continent to move to... well... where the jobs are. Military jobs, construction jobs, labor jobs. If you broaden your sights from white people history, you see things like the Great Migration out of the South for African-American families towards the West and North. Of course you do see the centuries-old pattern of migration from rural centers to the cities, or (again in America) the westward migration of Anglo settlers, and those have worked their ways into stories. But migration patterns from areas of similar population density? Don't see that, much.

I don't know; I'm just thinking about roots and where people come from. And it strikes me that I don't see much in the way of that archetype of older women in any other context. (I mean, they're not precisely thick on the ground. But.)

I think the only place I've seen those migratory patterns commented on within fantasy is Neil Gaiman's American Gods, and then only in passing. Funny, that.