I accidentally deleted the last William Morris book in my to-reread list from my phone and never got around to sending it back.

I started Walter Scott's The Talisman, because it's one of his few novels set in the middle ages, but there's some racism that's hard to swallow. There is a major Kurdish character, a knight under Saladin, who is... friends? With our Norman Scottish protagonist. The portrayal is not unsympathetic. I think Scott is doing his best to be even-handed, but like Catholicism, Islam just seems factually wrong and evil etc etc to him, and its adherents who are good guys are unfortunately misled. It's... hard to read. In retrospect, I'm surprised by how much he didn't dislike Judaism, in comparison.

Also started The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany. I read this as a teenager but remembered nothing. The narrative voice is quaint and charming. It's not really gripping me though.

No progress in Le Morte d'Arthur (Malory) or The Idylls of the King (Tennyson). The latter is more readable, comparatively, but I just don't really like reading verse. Also I did make some progress in The Faerie Queene (Spenser), and one verse narrative at a time is plenty.

Speaking of verse narratives, I still haven't made any more progress in the Wilson translation of Seneca's plays. (But the translations aren't in verse!) I might just have to skip Oedipus. I hate him for some reason.

I guess now I should actually reread all of Murderbot again, since I can't remember all the details and the show is starting to air. That should be comparatively quick though! I have the last Katherine Addison waiting and haven't gotten around to picking it up.

With all these things that I'm feeling decidedly unenthused about, I instead read the whole part of Jordanes' ancient history of the Goths that deals with wars with Asian invaders and then the entirety of Hervor's/Heidrek's saga, including the ancient poem called The Battle of the Goths and the Huns. (This is the only surviving medieval saga that deals with Gothic tribes in mainland Europe, and Jordanes' is the only other ancient source with relevance to Morris's The Roots of the Mountains.) I had made all the posts about that book which I had in mind when reading it, but yesterday I found a link on Tumblr to these two great essays about the context, history, and implications of the racism of Tolkien orcs/goblins by James Mendez Hodes (he doesn't mention Morris/ROTM or the specific borrowing from Jordanes alleged in Seaman's introduction to ROTM, but these links in the chain are immaterial to the argument): Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part I: A Species Built for Racial Terror. content warnings: racism, colonialism/imperialism, cultural conflation, sexism, sexual violence, anger & Orcs, Britons, and the Martial Race Myth, Part II: They're Not Human. These essays totally opened my eyes to a missing link in my understanding of the background of the racist portrayal of the Dusky Men - one I wouldn't have missed if I'd reread Said's Orientalism, which I probably should've. The gender aspect of the ROTM Huns is riffing on the extreme cultural openness and intermarriage habits of the Mongols, whose invasions were much later - 13th century, long after the christianization and settlement of the germanic tribes and the fall of the Roman empire. (More on the Mongols' real culture and the stereotypes in western culture surrounding them in his posts!) So that gives me something else to research. Maybe I actually will eventually form a coherent theory of what is going on with all the gender roles in this book!

I mentioned yesterday having just finished Gene Wolfe's 1987 fantasy classic, Soldier of the Mist, and the epithets and place names in it that I had trouble identifying. Last night I found this great article, which essentially solved the issue, providing the reasons for all the most significant place names:

Place Names in Gene Wolfe’s Soldier of the Mist, by Scott Wowra – Ultan's Library

“Hundred Eyed,” “Redface Island,” — Gene Wolfe’s (1986) Soldier of the Mist is awash with charming place names that evoke wonder and puzzlement. This essay uses the lens of toponymy, the formal study of place names, to explores how the protagonist Latro generates these intriguing and idiosyncratic labels.

Ironically, it was my curiosity about the last couple of bookmarked epithets I was trying to track down after this article (for the record, "Island of Liars", which is Crete, although I didn't find out why, and Horseland, which is Thessaly) that made me follow the author's top two linked sources to another article, Some Greek Themes in Gene Wolfe’s Latro novels by Jeremy Crampton, which opens with a fascinating discussion of Wolfe's reputation as a more difficult, sophisticated, or highbrow author:

When it came to The Book of the New Sun most readers were on the same starting line, and how far you delved into the book was largely an extent of your liking for the author and your own proclivities. With the Latro books, it is no longer so. Accusations, or at least warnings, have gone out (with justification), that if you want to go beyond the surface of these books, you have to know something about the Classical world.7 Herodotus seems to be a minimum requirement, particularly for Soldier of the Mist (hereafter Mist). It can be supplemented by modern commentaries on the Persian wars, cults and religion, Pindar’s Odes, Robert Graves on myths and legends...

Ironically, I say, because another ten or fifteen minutes with Google and Wikipedia after skimming through the parts of this article that didn't look spoilery, I finished defining all the references in the text I hadn't understood. Obviously, this doesn't dispute that you have to know "something about the Classical world"; it's one of my past monomanias (Edith Hamilton's Mythology, aged 11-14ish), but it's still a childhood monomania. I've never finished another book on Greek myth or history as long as the Hamilton, and most of the times my adult interest has intersected the field was from random Wikipedia spirals.

I've certainly never read Herodotus or Homer, and the point is, you don't have to read primary sources to have a good idea of the history they cover! To be an expert, yes, but to know the history? No! A pretty good idea of the world in question is what you need: to know what to look up and how to find it.

And the world is so different now! It's so much easier to fill in the gaps and find synopses and quick definitions by highlighting and websearching a word or phrase in the book you're reading; obviously, nothing like I've done would've been possible in the late 1980s.

BUT... if I had finished the book without Google/Wikipedia and just left with a list of epithets with question marks beside them, I could still have found them at a university reference library (possibly not without a reference librarian's assistance, but that's what they're for).

And if I hadn't looked them up, I wouldn't have learned as many new place names and extra tidbits about history, but I wouldn't have been failing to comprehend the story in any significant way... so ultimately, I really think this claim is rather overblown. (And it's said as the lead-in to the writer's conclusion that Wolfe is NOT just for readers with expert knowledge, but rather can be enjoyed on multiple levels. But that's after you already asserted that Herodotus was a minimum requirement.)

Human Rights Watch

Human Rights Watch investigates and reports on abuses happening in all corners of the world. We are roughly 450 people of 70-plus nationalities who are country experts, lawyers, journalists, and others who work to protect the most at risk, from vulnerable minorities and civilians in wartime, to refugees and children in need. We direct our advocacy towards governments, armed groups and businesses, pushing them to change or enforce their laws, policies and practices. To ensure our independence, we refuse government funding and carefully review all donations to ensure that they are consistent with our policies, mission, and values. We partner with organizations large and small across the globe to protect embattled activists and to help hold abusers to account and bring justice to victims.

I've been following, along with kleptocracy expert Casey Michel and authoritarian regime experts Sarah Kendzior and Andrea Chalupa of Gaslit Nation, Human Rights Watch's European Media Director Andrew Stroehlein since November 2016, when I did a deep dive into the nascent resistance in search of reliable experts and sources.

Here's a few links from Andrew Stroehlein's Twitter in the last couple of days:

• Bloomberg on Twitter: "Russia's billionaires lost $39 billion in one day https://t.co/yRQRmgHxo9" / Twitter



• AFP News Agency on Twitter: "#BREAKING Russia watchdog tells media not to use words 'invasion' and 'assault' https://t.co/5EDURRu7TV" / Twitter



• Russia: Arbitrary Detentions of Anti-War Protesters | Human Rights Watch



• Andrew Stroehlein on Twitter: "Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court “put combatants and commanders on notice that he was monitoring Russia’s invasion of #Ukraine and had jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute war crimes and crimes against humanity inside Ukraine.” https://t.co/7nRjBXTbs9" / Twitter

Christian Christensen on Twitter: "1) Reporter @Frisund at expresen publishes one of most important stories on #COVID19 in Sweden, lost in much of national & intl coverage. Namely, how #COVID19 has spread and impacted Stockholm residents in poorer, diverse districts. Key points here. https://t.co/hlNXxinBgP" / Twitter

Despite warnings in mid-March that certain segments of Stockholm were disproportionately impacted (with many cases involving Somali-Swedes), authorities were slow to react. Of the first 15 deaths in Stockholm, 6 were Somali-Swedes. A week after that, the number had doubled.

Thread summarizing the racist and incompetent bureaucratic trainwreck going on in Sweden's response to ballooning hot spots of pandemic in densely-populated low-income Somali-Swedish immigrant suburbs of Stockholm via LexiAlex.

Finland managed to act early in the trajectory of the disease and the measures seem to be helping thus far, but there were delays in appropriate action too, which were dealt with pretty promptly and apparently much better than this, as Wax pointed out: when they had to throw out their initial models and estimates the Prime Minister announced she had lost confidence in whoever was in charge of them and replaced them promptly, and apparently they're investigating? So although they're apparently continuing on trajectory for a min. 2-week lag before recommending face masks - still not an official peep in favor - on the whole it seems light-years better in terms of responses to changing situations, honesty and transparency on the part of officials etc (to say nothing of Sweden still sticking to leaving everything open, which has been discussed elsewhere).

We were speculating about what the differences are, and I think it might be down to the strong strain of what I call Fairness Kink in Finnish culture. Finnish culture strongly emphasizes the importance of fairness, and this leads to a logical focus on equality, and, I would argue, the relatively direct and plain-spoken norms are perhaps also connected. Finland has problems with corruption like everywhere, but the rates of corruption are lower; Finland has lawbreakers like everywhere but overall higher confidence in government and interest in following the rules. Finland has bureaucracy like everywhere, but it's maybe less obstructive and impossible to navigate. (Swedish culture does not share this. Sweden is big on egalitarianism and lagom - that is, moderation, restraint, reasonable medium, perhaps? - but there's a cultural trend to insist on upbeatness, far less plain speaking, much bigger problems historically with corruption, and far less equal gender distribution in the workplace. Wax says you even see it on customer service phonecalls: both artificial cheer and sometimes repellant amounts of passive aggression and indirectness.)

I've been meaning to do a post of the new YouTube channels I've discovered recently, but this one jumped the queue: yesterday I found Google Translate Sings, a series from singer malineka146's channel Translator Fails. These are covers of well-known songs with the lyrics put through Google Translate a bunch of times.

Yesterday I watched a bunch and went beyond tears of laughter into a higher plane of wheezing and gasping. I haven't seen all of them, but my favorites have been Friend Like Me from Aladdin, Hamilton, All Star and Panic at the Disco. (There's a lot of more recent pop songs that I don't know and a lot of show tunes.)

synecdochic posted: they really should have known the one thing we know is how to bring receipts

File 770 site owner refusing to let through synecdochic's cited comments debunking that copyright lawyer guy's willful misrepresentation of copyright law and sharing an email conversation with her on the subject with his friend who was busy attacking in defence of the Hugo's honor all over said comment section.

Oh, okay.

I first heard of the "Cora ball", a lint-collecting object that grabs microfibers in the washing machine to prevent their going down the drain to contaminate the water supply, from a link to its Kickstarter posted to Tumblr by jacquez45 years ago, but at that point the first round of Kickstarter was over and they weren't taking orders and didn't have a shipping date, plus they hadn't arranged any supply outside North America. As far as I can tell, nobody else is making a similar product yet, but they now have a worldwide database of stockists including a Dutch online store that serves the whole EU, so we will definitely get one (or a few?) soon (with all the usual caveats about the majority of pollution coming from industrial sources and collective action being necessary to enact real change! Aside from reducing the amount of lint we personally put into drains, though, this should probably be good for our washing machine, which, like everything else in our lives, sees way more lint than it was designed to thanks to our two angora house bunnies).

I'm kind of surprised that nobody else has started making a copycat of this yet though. It seems like the kind of thing where even if their actual design is patented, surely there are other ways you could construct things to remove lint in the washing cycle? For that matter, if it's a huge environmental problem that washing machines unlike dryers don't remove lint, maybe... address that? I mean, I know, that's talking about structural change, so it's probably a matter of regulation or a financial incentive for the industry to shift. But surely in the long term that is a much simpler [aspect of a] problem to solve than, say, the contamination from metabolized medication in water supplies, or the space requirements of solar farming, or the wildlife casualties of wind turbines, or maze of infrastructure and regulations that will have to change to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

me: [SHOWING MY WIFE MY NEW SULPHUR-CRESTED COCKATOO PHONE BACKGROUND AND PALM COCKATOO LOCKSCREEN]
waxjism: So are you in parrot fandom now?
me: [SHRUG EMOJI]

Specific parrot species that I am especially fond of include the palm cockatoo, the umbrella cockatoo, and every other kind of cockatoo; the caique; the budgie; the cockatiel; the rainbow lorikeet; and most recently, thanks to krait for informing me of their existence, the pacific parrotlet (but I also spent a long time looking at pictures of other types of parrotlets).

Specific individual birds that I am a fan of include Gotcha the cockatoo, Harley the cockatoo, Pedro the talking budgie (there's several videos of him talking nonstop for 20+ minutes 😂), Alex the honking cockatiel (his 'honk' is more of a squeaky toy squeak), and Charlie the parrotlet. Finally, allow me to include this parrots swearing compilation, because it's a beautiful and amazing thing when the tiny budgie says "Fuck off".

Australians, is it like... expected to wake up to kookaburras going off outside your window or on your balcony like this?