Hello, friends and enemies. It’s officially fall! We survived another summer. Sure, it still hit 100 degrees (38 Celsius) this week, but we have technically left summer behind us. Even though it’s been warm in the day, it’s cooling off quickly at night (thank you, longer nights), so it’s easier to tolerate. I haven’t gotten into any autumnal baking yet (see: the heat), but we did observe the turning of the seasons by getting our flu and covid vaccines this week. I hope you’ll get your shots too to avoid getting sick and help limit the spread of these illnesses. As a fringe benefit, research has found that getting the flu vaccine is linked to a reduced risk of alzheimer’s. By the way, the government is doing free covid tests again. You can order them here: https://special.usps.com/testkits.
I am fortunate that I haven’t gotten covid yet and I am desperately trying to keep my streak going. Research is showing that covid is way more than a cold or even a respiratory disease. It affects the whole body and it “might also be unmasking other neurodegenerative conditions,” which means if you have any genetic predisposition to something like Parkinsons, getting covid could be a catalyst for developing it earlier in life. One reason I think I haven’t gotten covid (even though Kirk did) was that I take allergy medication every day (if I don’t, my ears get plugged up and I can’t hear anything). There is some evidence that antihistamines can inhibit covid, although researchers are still looking into that. All this to say: please be careful out there! Covid is still raging and it can seriously fuck you up.
Books and Other Words
Vita Nostra by married couple Marina and Sergey Dyachenko (translated from the original Russian) is definitely a weird one but I liked it. It’s billed as a “dark academia,” magic school but make it creepy Russian, but I think it’s actually a lot more existential than that. The protagonist, Sasha, is coerced by a mysterious man named Farit into attending a university that she knows nothing about. Her fellow students were also forced to attend via threats of violence and none of them have any idea what they’re actually studying for. It’s a little hard to explain the plot because I think it is better to experience the book and let the weirdness of it creep over you.
Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It by Janina Ramírez puts the spotlight on various women from the middle ages as part of the ongoing work to restore women to the historical record. There are lots of reasons women’s voices were lost, including medieval “male writers [taking] the visions, words and ideas of female intellectuals and [rewriting] them for a largely male audience.” The title, Femina, refers to a the “label scribbled alongside texts known to be written by a woman, so less worthy of preservation.” Texts by women were regularly purged from libraries beginning in the Reformation, which is part of the reason we have so little remaining of women’s words today. Each of the book’s chapters begins with an archaeological discovery and takes a detailed look at the woman who would have been behind the artifact, including women like the Birka warrior, Hildegard of Bingen, and Queen Jadwiga of Poland. There was also a chapter on the Bayeux Tapestry and the women who would have been behind its creation. I find all this kind of thing fascinating, so of course I enjoyed the book. It’s both interesting and weird to me to consider that people from hundreds of years ago had lives as rich and complex as our own, and this book does a great job of reminding us that women have always been a part of this complexity, even when the historical record doesn’t reflect that. Finally, and this thought doesn’t fit neatly into the paragraph, I also have to share that I learned from Femina that the term “the dark ages” refers to “the lack of surviving textual evidence” from the period. It wasn’t uniquely ignorant, we just don’t have books from that period. There are so many things to know!
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- ‘Disastrous failure’: How Biden emboldened Israel to attack Lebanon via Al Jazeera. Israel is fully waging war on Lebanon now too and the US is still giving Israel billions of dollars all the time! I will continue screaming into the void that this is not okay and I do not want our tax dollars paying for this! I hate it!
- you’ve been traumatized into hating reading (and it makes you easier to oppress) via Threadings. This is a long and very thought-provoking essay on why so many people hate to read and how this disadvantages us in activism and the class struggle. The author also goes into how short-form video (like what we see on Tiktok and instagram) is not nearly as informative as it feels like it is and how that’s no replacement for actually reading a book. “Bite-sized thoughts—especially short form video—convince you that the whole thing is right in front of you. I am trapped in an academic zoo, wherein I produce thoughts or emotions or projects what have you and often receive nothing meaningful back. … Short conformity stunts our conversation to the length of your attention span. This undermines the communion between artist and muse.”
- Wikipedia is facing an existential crisis. Can gen Z save it? via The Guardian. Wikipedia is running the risk of being an old people activity and a relic of an earlier internet age. That sucks because it’s full of really good information. They are trying to encourage younger people to get involved and keep it a thriving and vibrant source of information.
- We’re losing our digital history. Can the Internet Archive save it? via the BBC. It seems that a lot of “Can X save Y” news was on my radar recently. From the article, “A quarter of all web pages that existed at some point between 2013 and 2023 now… don’t” and “one in five government websites contains at least one broken link. Pew found more than half of Wikipedia articles have a broken link in their references section, meaning the evidence backing up the online encyclopaedia’s information is slowly disintegrating.” It feels like the internet is permanent but it really isn’t! It makes you wonder if there’s going to be a giant empty space in the historical record when people look back on our era.
- IACHR calls for legislation and public policies to safeguard human rights of bisexual people via the Organization of American States. IACHR said bisexual rights!
TV and Music
I reactivated my Netflix subscription, mostly in anticipation of a new season of the Great British Baking Show (which started this week!), but Kirk and I also wanted to watch an anime called Delicious in Dungeon. There is technically a plot but it’s mostly about a group of adventurers working their way through a cursed dungeon, killing the various monsters inside, and turning them into the basis for haute cuisine. It’s cute and fun and we enjoyed it. Also, the main character Laios is the most autistic man of all time.
Rampant Consumerism
A month or so ago, we bought a new dining table set (from Costco lol, but it’s actually pretty nice!). Fritz really enjoys lounging on top of the table so we decided to get a tablecloth to attempt to prevent him from scratching up the surface before it has even seen a single Thanksgiving. The tablecloth is from Rough Linen, which I found a few months ago when I was possessed by the idea of getting linen dish towels. We really like the towels, so we decided to get a tablecloth from them too. That’s all well and good, but the real reason I wanted to share this was because Fritz thinks we set up a big table fort just for him. He spent half of yesterday on a chair tucked into the edge of the table cloth. He truly is my son.
Wikipedia
I’ve been increasingly invested in editing Wikipedia lately. I’m still working on translations with my respective teachers. Here’s a recent Icelandic translation of a place called Mikilbær. For Spanish, I am almost done translating and reviewing the article about the Bush v. Gore Supreme Court case, which has been challenging, but I am learning a lot and getting a lot of practice with the preterite versus imperfect tense and the subjunctive. Wikipedia’s Guild of Copy Editors is doing an editing drive this month so I have been participating in that too. I discovered there’s a page where people can request edits (usually in the process of developing a page into a “good article”) and I find it gratifying to edit something when people actually want editing. I edited the pages on Botswana and the North Yemen civil war this week, among others, and I learned quite a lot while doing it.
Autism Thoughts
The last week or so of work really sucked because I had to do a lot of work because a lot of people I work with didn’t realize that they were legally obligated to make their documents accessible. Unfortunately, my job is to make the documents accessible. This is a noble task, but I don’t like doing it all at once. I know I’m not special or unique for not wanting to work, but sometimes it feels so painful to have to work when all I want to do is translate my Wikipedia pages (or whatever I may be focused on at the moment). It’s not even the work itself, since I am clearly invested in editing Wikipedia even when I don’t feel like editing at work. There is some research suggesting that letting autistic people engage in their special interests helps emotional regulation. As this article puts it, “Research shows that beyond such practical benefits, a special interest often has deeper value. ‘It reduces stress. It helps the person to calm down when they’re upset.'” I love doing my little activities. I just don’t know how to reconcile the fact that my brain lights way up when I am doing things I want to do and that I have to drag myself kicking and screaming to do the job I get paid to do.
Kitchen Witchery
I’ve been into the Smitten Kitchen archives a lot lately and last week I tried her herbed summer squash pasta bake. It sounds very fancy but as I was making it, I realized it’s really just macaroni and cheese with squash in it. And there’s nothing wrong with that! This deserves to be celebrated! It was very good and a good way to get some extra vegetables with my macaroni and cheese. I just got the new cookbook, The Bean Book, co-authored by Steve Sando of Rancho Gordo. I tried the cheesy black beans and corn bake and we liked it. The book recommends serving it with some chips or tortillas, but I made rice to go with it.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. If anyone is wondering, Fritz is still being a poop bandit and rejecting pooping in the littler box. The current prevailing theory, which Kirk proposed, is that Fritz is traumatized about pooping in the box after an incident a few months ago when the poop stuck to his butt and he spent 15 minutes racing around the house trying to escape it. Fritz continues to pee in the box just fine but he seems frustrated that we keep forcing him into the litter box when he seems to be gearing up to shit. Is this too much information? I don’t know, but it’s my life.
