september's coming soon

The reason I hate vegans is that I have no problems consuming egg and dairy yet googling for vegetarian versions of various dishes requires me to specificy "-vegan" because if not the first ten hits are without fail ones that on principle exclude cheese and yoghurt.

Also, fungi are fundamentally disturbing organisms and I am genetically programmed since generations beyond written history to find it revolting to consume things that exist solely to decompose organic material.







*I don't actually hate vegans

The internet war on sex is here, about other platforms cracking down on female-presenting nipples.

Tumblr's porn ban is the middle of the end of the old internet, about the demise of noughties online platforms being bought out by the big companies and then shut down.

Tumblr's porn ban reveals who controls what we see onlin, about Apple wielding the IOS store hammer over porn on third-party platforms.

As the current stories go, although official word of course does not confirm it:

Tumblr is only the disc one villain in this story. The final boss is the ghost of Steve Jobs

The one thing I oddly have yet to mention in either of my lengthy missives about my ill-fated love of the Windows Phone OS, was the fact that like half the reason I'm here in the first place is becaues I'll be dead before I'll own a bloody Iphone. It's a long and very petty story, but suffice it to say that my bitter annoyance with Apple naturally grew into a keen interest in criticism of Apple. The criticism of Apple that existed a decade ago was mainly concerned with its Walled Garden politics.

Quickly summarised: A walled garden is platform where the content available is curated by the people running it - in the specific case of the Iphone, the fact that the only software you're allowed to install on your device is software that follows the guidelines of the IOS app store.

With the way the internet and the usage of computers has evolved the last decade and half, it's hardly surprising that walled gardens are par for the course of the everyman. Most people I know use the internet mainly for social media and media consumption, all of which happen either on apps or on proprietary websites. The generation before me learned to use computers in order to use spreadsheets and text editing at work; the generation after are the digital natives who cannot imagine a world without youtube. But nineties kids were young when the internet was young.

I entered fandom when the web was still the open sea that required some fundamental tech knowledge to be navigated, but which was gloriously anarchic and gloriously equal when you learned how to make and share your websites. Even the fandom hubs were non-profit and run by amateurs. My computer was a tool, and the idea that the people manufacturing the tool was going to tell me what I was allowed to use it for was ridiculous. Even if my childish boicott of Iproducts wasn't a thing, I'd still be uncomfortable, to say the least, about using a platform that effectively wanted to dictate how I was using it. (ironically, the Windows store too is a Walled Garden. Let's talk about my hypocricy later)

But fandom, for all that it was full of early adopters in 2001, found its home in the proto-social media on LJ, and when it migrated from LJ, it didn't go to the known fandom-friendly LJ clones, but to modern social media. Finding out why people went to tumblr instead of dreamdwidth is nigh impossible at this point; whichever came first, fact is that the migration from LJ coincided with the smartphones taking over the mobile market. The result: A considerable amount of fandom is happening on phones, not computers. Phones use apps, and the stats say that about half of those apps will be curated by the IOS app store.

And the Apple business model is to be accessible to all users, and to be accessible to all users there needs to be handholding and protecting of the children, so ix-nay on the porn.

There is a debate going on about the World Wide Web vs. the app-based internet usage that I sadly have not followed nearly close enough to say something insightful about, but the tumblr strikethrough is the point where it hits fandom. Because if tumblr is purging the smut becaues it lost half its mobile users, then there is a lot to be said about how Apple's policy makers are effectively no-platforming creators on third-party software, and policing the content consumption of their own customers. Ideally, you could say that this is of course the choice the IOS users make when they buy an Idevice, but if Apple is using their size to dictate the content on a third-party platform, then the internet just got a great bit worse than I used to think that it was.

I might never have been a particularly avid fan of tumblr, but dear god, if there ever was a reason for arguing that the move from the web to app-based internet was Bad News, it is if the policymakers of some multinational company is going to decide what kind of pictures I get to look at on a website which they do not even own.

ETA 15/12: The latest story going around is that tumblr was planning the porn bann already in August or September, though I can't find this confirmed anywhere. If it's true, it disproves the causality I speculate about here. Though not, I'm afraid, the theory behind it.

Oh you know you've reached some level of extraordinary nerdery when you google karlsruhe katholisch oder evangelisch even though FFS, what are the chances of some seventies shoujo artist knowing the goddamn difference and the implications of the ending are pretty goddamn clear. I mean. The genre draws back to a (widely assumed autobiographical) novel set in a French boarding school and we all know which version of Christianity belongs there.

( The break with traditional western Christian narrative has left me confused )

If you're actually curious: Contemporary statistics say there are about equal numbers of Protestants and Catholics in Karlsruhe. Although Baden in the nineteenth century saw Catholics outweighting Protestants two to one, Karlsruhe was one of the few districts with a Protestant majority. But of course, Schlotterbach isn't actually in Karlsruhe but somewhere unspecified north of it, so who the hell even knows what things would be like a hundred and thirty years later. 2017 stats say Baden-Württemberg has 30% Protestants, 33% Catholics.

I also spent some quality wiki time trying to figure out if their giving their location as "Baden" rather than Baden-Württemberg could somehow be an indication of period, but the only post-WWII entity known as Baden only was further south (and ceased to exist when BaWü was founded in 1952, anyway). So the best indication of "when is this even happening" seems to be Siegfried's groovy sunglasses and flower power hair, unless someone can actually get something useful out of Julius' friend's car.

2020 ETA: According to our lord and saviors Google and Wikipedia, the only thing named "Schlotterbach" in Germany is a tributary to the the tributary to the tributary to some river in the district of Ravensburg, which is in fact in BaWü. On the opposite end of Bawû from Karlsruhe, though, so the real question remains how Hagio even found the name in the first place.

( Or 'Vaiana' as it's named around here, thanks to a copyrighted porn star name )

It might in part be the fact that Wind Waker and Spirit Tracks were the only Zelda games that engaged me enought to spend hours on them, but this is a genuinely good film and it's a goddamn pity that the songs are so meh.

Like, even the fucking Phil Collins numbers from the millenial era worked better than the songs in this one.

But except from that it's really great, and certainly far above the medicricy of Frozen.

My mother once told me that she never felt like an adult until she became a mother, and I can see that. Socialising a little barbarian into a functional member of society leaves little room for joking around, so of course adults are boring and mean.

And I have, indubitably, reached that age myself because I went into a store to look for a foodskin today, and when I asked if they had more lunchboxes than the ones up front, was promptly pointed towards "the Disney ones and the ones with [some brand with bears that people with small children are clearly expected to be familiar with]", because of course women in their thirties don't buy luncboxes for themselves.

In the supermarket, I got myself my very first Marvel merch, which was also my very first lego that I've bought with my own cash (Thor and Loki, if you're curious). And then I was carded at the self-check-out for something from ages six and up, which I guess was either Moana or Zootropolis.

I'm pretty sure I have to surrender all claims at parenthood anyway by finding this funny.

It's "YA fantasy gothic romance", apparently. I have no bloody clue where no less than two of the people writing blurbs found the 'gothic'. The romance does very much not play the narrative role you expect from something defined within the genre, and the fantasy is... somewhat the same, honestly. It is, however, written for teens, so... one out of four?

This isn't a problem with the novel as such, but with the way people are trying to sell it. You should definitely give it a try if the description below appeals to you, because I enjoyed it a lot. The "a lot" because of admittedly dumb spoilery reasons I'll detail under the cut. Overall, it is funny and occasionally touching and I liked all of the main cast.

The best summary I can give is probably this fine illustration, greeting you as you turn the page to the first chapter:



In more detail: Neglected British child goes to ~magical school~, keeps on being somewhat of an outsider there and spends his days with genius girl who is also somewhat of an outsider, and part of every summer holiday with the cheerful family of a boy who is very much a part of the establishment.

Or: Blaming the victim is always wrong but even slightly-shorter-than-average-for-his-age Elliot Schafer knows that he'd have an easier time if he wasn't compulsed to sass popular kids who taller and stronger than him. And at least he's not beat up in diplomacy classes in The Border Camp of The Otherlands, where he elected to stay because of the hot elf babe Serene-Heart-In-The-Chaos-Of-Battle. Unfortunately, Serene has attached herself to Luke Sunborn, who is tall and strong and popular and Elliot is most certainly not his friend, don't be disgusting.

Yes the core of the plot is inescapably Potter, but that's about as far as the similarities go. The standard fantasy plot of "ending a war and saving the world" is nominally there, but takes a definite backseat to Elliots social and romantic going-ons. Elliot, Serene and Luke are about as far removed from Harry, Hermione and Ron as you get. Elliot is bookish but otherwise unremarkable, Serene is a culturally out-of-sync warrior. Luke is... an inversion of Ron Weasly, mostly: the kind and polite and introverted and unconsciously popular kid who excells at everything concerning sports and martial arts, descending from one of the most revered families in the land. Also, there's this thing about Elliot worshipping the ground on which Serene walks so loudly and so out of character for him that no-one thinks he means it. There's his on-going, one-sided contempt of everything that is Luke Sunborn. The dynamics are so different that you'd be hard-pressed to get Hogwarts flashbacks except for the few reminders that Elliot's dad is a dick.

The illustration hints at the tone. In Other Lands follows Elliot through ages thirteen to seventeen, for his education in ~magical school~. Since Elliot is a precocious bookworm full of salt and vinegar, his narrative is a running line of snark about most everything - that is, when he's not lapsing exceedingly poetic about Serene's virtues. Four years are crammed into fourhundredandsome pages, and it's hardly a surprise that the fantasy keystones of "worldbuilding" and "political plot" take a definite backseat here. More than anything, this is a novel about growing up and becoming a better person, and I - at least - certainly think that shit is more entertaining if it comes through mermaid fanboying and casual elvish sexism ("A woman's experience of blood and pain is, naturally, what makes womenkind particularly suited for the battlefield. Whereas men are the softer sex, squeamish about blood in the main. I know it's the same for human men, Luke was extremely disinclined to discuss my first experience of a woman's menses.")

There's a plotline about a theatre club setting up the Romeo and Juliet of The Otherlands. For god's sake.

Yes, this is essentially a high school AU set in Narnia. It was not terribly surprising, when googled, that this started out as an "online novel". And wouldn't you know it: On the author's webpage, the commentaries she'd made to her work as she initially published it was links to good ole' eljay.

I have to talk about that, of course. Because I definitely suspect that part of the reason I enjoyed this book so much, was that there are elements of this book that definitely read like fanfic. Less so than The Captive Prince, for what it's worth.

SPOILERS BELOW THIS POINT.

( i shipped it from like page two )