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Books
Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell - This is about how cults from the murderous (Jonestone) to the benign (Soulcycle, CrossFit) to everything in between (Scientology, MLMs) use the same sort of linguistic tricks to recruit and retain members. Basically, another title for this could have been: It's Not Brainwashing, It's The Power of Language.
I had an interesting experience reading this because as I was going chapter to chapter I found myself thinking...this is a lot like how anti-trans fuckwits in the UK talk. And then I got to the chapter on thought terminating cliches, which are little catch all phrases that cults deploy to stop their members from engaging with counter arguments, and I had this little lightbulb moment of, like, holy shit, that's why they start screaming "biology is real!!1!" in response to a fairly innocuous point like, 'they've had self-id in Ireland for years and it's fine.'
Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert - This is about humanity's history of interfering with the natural world in order to try and fix what we fucked up when we interfered the first time, and it goes through our storied history of introducing predatory invasive species to deal with the first invasive species and making everything worse, to our attempts to breed heat resistant corals because we've fucked the oceans, to the current possibility of geo-engineering out way out of the climate crisis. The chapter on geo-engineering is genuinely terrifying because the experts in the field that Kolbert interviews all say basically the same thing, that geo-engineering is a terrible idea, with unforeseeable consequences, and we should not do it. But we might have to anyway.
TV
The Book of Boba Fett S1 - Admittedly, I watched this in the same spirt I have watched all the Marvel/Star Wars shows, the spirit of: 'Hey, it's Wednesday, I should watch the new episode of whatever Disney+ show they are currently leveraging to stop me cancelling my subscription while I cook my tea.' They are all basically the same show - none of them are worse than competent (though The Falcon and the Winter Soldier came close) and none of them are better than pretty good (though WandaVision tried.) Even so, it was hard to get invested in s show that by the halfway point had grown so bored of itself that it turned into season three of an entirely different and much better show.
In the end my only takeaway was this: Dear whoever at Disney who is in charge of the Star Wars IP, if you must use Luke Skywalker, or indeed younger versions of any legacy characters, I beg of you, I beg of you, just recast. I guarantee that, after an initial adjustment period, it will be less distracting than that creepy deepfaked voice, dead-eyed CGI head monstrosity.
The Legend of Vox Machina S1 - This was fine. I had fun with the episodes when I sat down to watch them, I'll watch more if they make them, but nothing about it made me want to go back and listen to campaign one. I didn't dislike any of the characters (...well, Scanlan was hard work) but equally there weren't any that had me going: 'I want to spend several hundred hours with these goobers.'
But I do feel like I have enough background now to follow along with whatever Laudna's deal is in C3, and enough context to read Vex/Keyleth fics, which is really all I wanted from the show.
Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell - This is about how cults from the murderous (Jonestone) to the benign (Soulcycle, CrossFit) to everything in between (Scientology, MLMs) use the same sort of linguistic tricks to recruit and retain members. Basically, another title for this could have been: It's Not Brainwashing, It's The Power of Language.
I had an interesting experience reading this because as I was going chapter to chapter I found myself thinking...this is a lot like how anti-trans fuckwits in the UK talk. And then I got to the chapter on thought terminating cliches, which are little catch all phrases that cults deploy to stop their members from engaging with counter arguments, and I had this little lightbulb moment of, like, holy shit, that's why they start screaming "biology is real!!1!" in response to a fairly innocuous point like, 'they've had self-id in Ireland for years and it's fine.'
Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert - This is about humanity's history of interfering with the natural world in order to try and fix what we fucked up when we interfered the first time, and it goes through our storied history of introducing predatory invasive species to deal with the first invasive species and making everything worse, to our attempts to breed heat resistant corals because we've fucked the oceans, to the current possibility of geo-engineering out way out of the climate crisis. The chapter on geo-engineering is genuinely terrifying because the experts in the field that Kolbert interviews all say basically the same thing, that geo-engineering is a terrible idea, with unforeseeable consequences, and we should not do it. But we might have to anyway.
TV
The Book of Boba Fett S1 - Admittedly, I watched this in the same spirt I have watched all the Marvel/Star Wars shows, the spirit of: 'Hey, it's Wednesday, I should watch the new episode of whatever Disney+ show they are currently leveraging to stop me cancelling my subscription while I cook my tea.' They are all basically the same show - none of them are worse than competent (though The Falcon and the Winter Soldier came close) and none of them are better than pretty good (though WandaVision tried.) Even so, it was hard to get invested in s show that by the halfway point had grown so bored of itself that it turned into season three of an entirely different and much better show.
In the end my only takeaway was this: Dear whoever at Disney who is in charge of the Star Wars IP, if you must use Luke Skywalker, or indeed younger versions of any legacy characters, I beg of you, I beg of you, just recast. I guarantee that, after an initial adjustment period, it will be less distracting than that creepy deepfaked voice, dead-eyed CGI head monstrosity.
The Legend of Vox Machina S1 - This was fine. I had fun with the episodes when I sat down to watch them, I'll watch more if they make them, but nothing about it made me want to go back and listen to campaign one. I didn't dislike any of the characters (...well, Scanlan was hard work) but equally there weren't any that had me going: 'I want to spend several hundred hours with these goobers.'
But I do feel like I have enough background now to follow along with whatever Laudna's deal is in C3, and enough context to read Vex/Keyleth fics, which is really all I wanted from the show.