Chocolatefker - Im A Kitty Cat Cat

You know that tumblr post that's like "Adults: why don't kids go outside?" and then there's a picture of a very pedestrian-unfriendly street from probably somewhere in the US?

I've been thinking a lot about how community seems to be lacking in fandom recently, and over on Dreamwidth people have been making some excellent points. I think modern social media is another place where adults have created a space that is hostile to young people trying to navigate their way online.

I get a lot of asks and see a lot of posts from young people lamenting the fact that they don't know how to make friends online. Because this isn't a problem that I experience, I've had a tendency to think along the lines of "kids these days" etc. But that's the easy out. Most of the people I'd consider "online friends" of mine are people I met online several years ago or they're people I met IRL and we just don't live near each other so our friendship happens online. I can't honestly say I'd feel confident in trying to make new friends on modern social media today.

If you start thinking about it more critically, it makes total sense that it's harder to make friends now. Modern social media has been optimized for "engagement." The goal of twitter or tumblr or instagram or tiktok isn't to help users find each other and talk to each other. The goal of those platforms is to keep people on those platforms. The more people they have on their platform, the more money they make. The more time people spend on their platform, the more money they make.

How do you make people spend more time on the platform? You make it as passive and entertaining as possible. Scrolling through tiktok is like channel surfing on a TV in the 90s or early 2000s. Scrolling through twitter or tumblr or facebook is just putting interesting or pretty or funny or angering things in front of your eyeballs until you get bored and switch to the next app, cycling your way through them.

Timestamps are hard to find. Content isn't chronological. Posts are dropped in on your feed from unknown sources, decided by an algorithm. I wouldn't be surprised if they did research into how casinos keep people inside and gambling when they made a lot of these decisions.

Each one of these decisions, all on its own, undermines our ability to find and form a community. Each one makes it harder to make friends to have a conversation. It's hard to get to know someone or have a discussion with them when you have no idea if what you're saying will be seen by 1 person or 1 million. I'm probably not the only person on this site that feels like I'm either an observer or a performer, but I'm rarely a participant.

The internet used to be a vibrant, weird, wonderful place where communities could pop up and grow. Now, our best shot at community is getting invited to a Discord server and hoping it still exists 2 weeks from now.

Web 1.0 wasn't perfect in a lot of ways, but I think it was a lot better for community than what we've got now.

I need to print me out a list of everything they own so I don’t buy it when I go to the store

Essays

Here’s a (non-exhaustive) list of essays I like/find interesting/are food for thought; I’ve tried to sort them as much as possible. The starred (*) ones are those I especially love

also quick note: some of these links, especially the ones that are from books/anthologies redirect you to libgen or scihub, and if that doesn’t work for you, do message me; I’d be happy to send them across!

Literature + Writing

Godot Comes to Sarajevo - Susan Sontag

The Strangeness of Grief - V. S. Naipaul*

Memories of V. S. Naipaul - Paul Theroux*

A Rainy Day with Ruskin Bond - Mayank Austen Soofi

How Albert Camus Faced History - Adam Gopnik

Listen, Bro - Jo Livingstone

Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel - Judith Thurman

Lost in Translation: What the First Line of “The Stranger” Should Be - Ryan Bloom

The Duke in His Domain - Truman Capote*

The Cult of Donna Tartt: Themes and Strategies in The Secret History - Ana Rita Catalão Guedes

Never Do That to a Book - Anne Fadiman*

Affecting Anger: Ideologies of Community Mobilisation in Early Hindi Novel - Rohan Chauhan*

Why I Write - George Orwell*

Rimbaud and Patti Smith: Style as Social Deviance - Carrie Jaurès Noland*

Art + Photography (+ Aesthetics)

Looking at War - Susan Sontag*

Love, sex, art, and death - Nan Goldin, David Wojnarowicz

Lyons, Szarkowski, and the Perception of Photography - Anne Wilkes Tucker

The Feminist Critique of Art History - Thalia Gouma-Peterson, Patricia Mathews

In Plato’s Cave - Susan Sontag*

On reproduction of art (Chapter 1, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

On nudity and women in art (Chapter 3, Ways of Seeing) - John Berger*

Kalighat Paintings  - Sharmishtha Chaudhuri

Daydreams and Fragments: On How We Retrieve Images From the Past -  Maël Renouard

Arthur Rimbaud: the Aesthetics of Intoxication - Enid Rhodes Peschel

Cities

Tragic Fable of Mumbai Mills - Gyan Prakash

Whose Bandra is it? - Dustin Silgardo*

Timur’s Registan: noblest public square in the world? - Srinath Perur

The first Starbucks coffee shop, Seattle - Colin Marshall*

Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus, Mumbai’s iconic railway station - Srinath Perur

From London to Mumbai and Back Again: Gentrification and Public Policy in Comparative Perspective -  Andrew Harris

The Limits of “White Town” in Colonial Calcutta - Swati Chattopadhyay

The Metropolis and Mental Life - Georg Simmel

Colonial Policy and the Culture of Immigration: Citing the Social History of Varanasi - Vinod Kumar, Shiv Narayan

A Caribbean Creole Capital: Kingston, Jamaica - Coln G. Clarke (from Colonial Cities by Robert Ross, Gerard J. Telkamp

The Colonial City and the Post-Colonial World - G. A. de Bruijne

The Nowhere City - Amos Elon*

The Vertical Flâneur: Narratorial Tradecraft in the Colonial Metropolis - Paul K. Saint-Amour

Philosophy

The trolley problem problem - James Wilson

A Brief History of Death - Nir Baram

Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical - John Rawls*

Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation? - John E. Roemer

The Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief - Scott Berinato*

The Pandemic and the Crisis of Faith - Makarand Paranjape

If God Is Dead, Your Time is Everything - James Wood

Giving Up on God - Ronald Inglehart

The Limits of Consensual Decision - Douglas Rae*

The Science of “Muddling Through” - Charles Lindblom*

History

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine - Maria Dolan

The History of Loneliness - Jill Lepore*

The Anti-Che - Jay Nordlinger

From Tuskegee to Togo: the Problem of Freedom in the Empire of Cotton - Sven Beckert*

Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism - E. P. Thompson*

All By Myself - Martha Bailey*

The Geographical Pivot of History - H. J. Mackinder

The sea/ocean

Rim of Life - Manu Pillai

Exploring the Indian Ocean as a rich archive of history – above and below the water line - Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery

‘Piracy’, connectivity and seaborne power in the Middle Ages - Nikolas Jaspert (from The Sea in History)*

The Vikings and their age - Nils Blomkvist (from The Sea in History)*

Mercantile Networks, Port Cities, and “Pirate” States - Roxani Eleni Margariti

Phantom Peril in the Arctic - Robert David English, Morgan Grant Gardner*

Assorted ones on India

A departure from history: Kashmiri Pandits, 1990-2001 - Alexander Evans *

Writing Post-Orientalist Histories of the Third World - Gyan Prakash

Empire: How Colonial India Made Modern Britain - Aditya Mukherjee

Feminism and Nationalism in India, 1917-1947 - Aparna Basu

The Epic Riddle of Dating Ramayana, Mahabharata - Sunaina Kumar*

Caste and Politics: Identity Over System - Dipankar Gupta

Our worldview is Delhi based*

Sports (you’ll have to excuse the fact that it’s only cricket but what can i say, i’m indian)

‘Massa Day Done:’ Cricket as a Catalyst for West Indian Independence: 1950-1962 - John Newman*

Playing for power? rugby, Afrikaner nationalism and masculinity in South Africa, c.1900–70 - Albert Grundlingh

When Cricket Was a Symbol, Not Just a Sport - Baz Dreisinger

Cricket, caste, community, colonialism: the politics of a great game - Ramachandra Guha*

Cricket and Politics in Colonial India - Ramchandra Guha

MS Dhoni: A quiet radical who did it his way*

Music

Brega: Music and Conflict in Urban Brazil - Samuel M. Araújo

Color, Music and Conflict: A Study of Aggression in Trinidad with Reference to the Role of Traditional Music - J. D. Elder

The 1975 - ‘Notes On a Conditional Form’ review - Dan Stubbs*

Life Without Live - Rob Sheffield*

How Britney Spears Changed Pop - Rob Sheffield

Concert for Bangladesh

From “Help!” to “Helping out a Friend”: Imagining South Asia through the Beatles and the Concert for Bangladesh - Samantha Christiansen 

Gender

Clothing Behaviour as Non-verbal Resistance - Diana Crane

The Normalisation of Queer Theory - David M. Halperin

Menstruation and the Holocaust - Jo-Ann Owusu*

Women’s Suffrage the Democratic Peace - Allan Dafoe

Pink and Blue: Coloring Inside the Lines of Gender - Catherine Zuckerman*

Women’s health concerns are dismissed more, studied less - Zoanne Clack

Food

How Food-Obsessed Millennials Shape the Future of Food - Rachel A. Becker (as a non-food obsessed somewhat-millennial, this was interesting)

Colonialism’s effect on how and what we eat - Coral Lee

Tracing Europe’s influence on India’s culinary heritage - Ruth Dsouza Prabhu

Chicken Kiev: the world’s most contested ready-meal*

From Russia with mayo: the story of a Soviet super-salad*

The Politics of Pancakes - Taylor Aucoin*

How Doughnuts Fuelled the American Dream*

Pav from the Nau

A Short History of the Vada Pav - Saira Menezes

Fantasy (mostly just harry potter and lord of the rings)

Purebloods and Mudbloods: Race, Species, and Power (from The Politics of Harry Potter)

Azkaban: Discipline, Punishment, and Human Rights (from The Politics of Harry Potter)*

Good and Evil in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lengendarium - Jyrki Korpua

The Fairy Story: J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis - Colin Duriez (from Tree of Tales)*

Tolkien’s Augustinian Understanding of Good and Evil: Why The Lord of the Rings Is Not Manichean - Ralph Wood (from Tree of Tales)*

Travel

The Hidden Cost of Wildlife Tourism

Chronicles of a Writer’s 1950s Road Trip Across France - Kathleen Phelan

On the Early Women Pioneers of Trail Hiking - Gwenyth Loose

On the Mythologies of the Himalaya Mountains - Ed Douglas*

More random assorted ones

The cosmos from the wheelchair (The Economist obituaries)*

In El Salvador - Joan Didion

Scientists are unravelling the mystery of pain - Yudhijit Banerjee

Notes on Nationalism - George Orwell

Politics and the English Language - George Orwell*

What Do the Humanities Do in a Crisis? - Agnes Callard*

The Politics of Joker - Kyle Smith

Sushant Singh Rajput: The outsider - Uday Bhatia*

Credibility and Mystery - John Berger

happy reading :)

I love your blog and your space asks but please pray tell what's the moon boom that jumpingjacktrash mentioned?

have you ever looked up into the night sky and wondered, why the moon is?

well, you’re not alone! scientists and learnéd scholars across the ages have been baffled by our celestial neighbor.

WHY, is our Moon so proportionally fucking huge? (it’s more than a quarter the size of the Earth! that’s COMPLETELY FUCKING INSANE AND BLOWS EVERY OTHER MOON IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM OUT OF THE METAPHORICAL WATER)

WHY, is the Moon made up of much of the same materials as the Earth?

and WHY, is Earth’s magnetic field so massively overpowered that it can shield the surface from interstellar and solar radiation, allowing life to develop and paving the way for you to even ask these questions in the first place? (that one might not sound related, but I promise you it is so just bear with me)

well, it all comes down to the Theia Impact Hypothesis, or, OPERATION MOON BOOM.

in this fair solar system we lay our scene, four and a half billion years ago.

here, we focus on the third planet from the Sun, which is, surprisingly, NOT Earth.

not yet.

no, this unnamed rocky world is slightly smaller than Venus, and is formed of mostly-molten rock that’s still settling into itself as our nascent solar system sorts itself out.

ENTER STAGE LEFT, THEIA.

Theia is a rocky planetoid about the size of Mars, on a wild and unstable orbit around the Sun that regularly brings it within spitting distance of our unnamed third rock! and today, it will get A Bit Too Close.

the two planets slam into each other with wild disregard for road safety, disintegrating their outer layers into a massive debris field that will take hundreds of millions of years to settle and fusing their planetary cores together into a single rough oblong of molten iron! BAM! WHAPPO!

but settle the debris does, as gravity takes a gentle but firm hold of this huge mess and gradually reshapes it into two familiar faces…

ENTER STAGE RIGHT: EARTH AND MOON.

that’s right, you’re standing on top of the alchemically-fused corpses of, not one, but TWO planets right now! our newly-reborn Earth and its singular orbiting satellite are formed from the same debris field and share a lot of similar material. and because the Moon was Made, and not a domesticated planetoid that wandered too close and got trapped in the orbit of a larger body, it’s just ludicrously HUGE compared to its partner.

and getting back to that magnetic field thing, the whole reason Earth Can Have Big Field Pls is because Theia dumped so much extra iron into the Core that it generates a MUCH more powerful field than our neighboring planets, even the ones that are just slightly smaller than Earth!

the only reason that life can exist at all is because Theia took one for the team and reshaped the solar system.

so the next time you look up into the celestial dome and spot our closest neighbor, raise a salute to Theia, gone but not forgotten.