“I’ll make this a weekly feature!” I said. Two months later… uh.
But here are some things I’ve enjoyed recently!
What I’m Hearing: You’re Wrong About recently did an episode about how the New York Times has fallen down on the job when it comes to reporting on trans people. That led me down a tiny rabbit hole to Gender Reveal, which has been a fantastic listen as somebody whose nonbinary egg only cracked a couple years ago. I am always down for people talking about gender and pushing back against the binary!
What I’m Reading: The Archive of Our Own, a major fanfic website, is undergoing a reckoning over how it handles complaints of racism; #EndOTWRacism (OTW = Organization of Transformative Works, the org that runs AO3) has been trending in fandom circles ever since a concerted pushback campaign began earlier in the month. On Dreamwidth, chestnut_pod wrote an impressively detailed, thorough post about actions OTW could take that balance the needs of communities of color with the anti-censorship “maximum inclusivity of content” ethos AO3 was founded on. The comments have a ton of lively and incisive discussion going on, too – both about the End OTW Racism campaign and OTW/AO3’s ongoing issues.
(I also wrote a Dreamwidth post of my own, from the perspective of somebody with a library preservation/book conservation background, in specific response to people insisting “it’s an archive, it HAS to collect everything!” Related: there’s a new play that just opened in DC, “Here There Are Blueberries,” based on a true story of how the Holocaust Museum handled the inclusion of reprehensible content in their archives.)
What I’m Watching: I watched… all of ten minutes of Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves with my girlfriend last weekend before her TV crapped out, and now I’m just patiently sitting on my hands, waiting for when we can watch the rest of it. Even just the tiny bit I saw was as fun as everyone’s been saying. I’m not a fan of how Everything Is IP nowadays, but look: if you’re gonna make a movie based on existing IP, a roleplaying game that allows endless flexibility in story and character is 100% the way to go.