Thing of Things Is Moving!

After five years on WordPress, Thing of Things is moving to Substack!

I have been pretty dissatisfied with WordPress for a while, as they have replaced their good text editor with an abominably awful text editor. Substack has a much better one. I also want to be one of the cool kids and everyone else is doing it.

My substack is here. All posts will be available for free for an indefinite period, although I may open up paid subscriptions at some point in the future. The first post will go up tomorrow morning.

I hope you will join me! I have some interesting posts planned.

The Conflicted Omnivore

I recently made a quiz about what Americans believe about animal rights, and the results shocked a lot of people. 74% of Americans think that animals have rights? 32% think that animals have the same rights as people to be free from harm and exploitation? And yet only a few percent of the American population is vegan or vegetarian? How does that make any sense at all?

The answer is that quite a lot of people are conflicted omnivores: that is, people who suspect that it may be morally wrong to eat meat but who continue to eat meat anyway.

A study of omnivores’ attitudes towards meat-eating suggested that about 32% of Americans, 39% of Germans, and 59% of French people are conflicted omnivores. (Unfortunately, the study is currently unpublished, so we can’t take a look at their methods.) Conflicted omnivores are more likely than contented omnivores to be female, liberal, and concerned about animals or the environment. They are more likely to intend to reduce or eliminate their meat consumption and also eat less meat overall. Conflicted omnivores are less likely to buy into the 4Ns of meat consumption: that human beings naturally eat meat; that eating meat is necessary to be healthy; that it is normal to eat meat and vegetarians are weird and socially unacceptable; and that eating meat is nice and meals without meat are bland, boring, and generally not worth eating. Conflicted omnivores are also more egalitarian and less likely to think that social hierarchies are a good thing.

Studies reliably show a high rate of support for animal welfare and rights in general and for even fairly extreme specific proposals. For example, about half of Americans support banning factory farming. In line with this, animal welfare propositions consistently win big at the ballot box; while legislators drag their feet, voters are usually in favor of stronger animal welfare protections. And yet most people eat meat.

It isn’t unreasonable, I think, to argue that many people experience some amount of conflict between their opposition to factory farming and their interest in tasty tasty animals.

A study by Sentience Institute found that 75% of Americans believe they usually buy meat and eggs from animals that were treated humanely. Approximately 1% of animals live on farms where they are treated humanely. It makes sense that people believe they eat humanely raised animal products: it’s not obvious that terms like “free-range”, “organic”, or “all-natural” are as meaningless as they actually are. (I suspect there’s also some wishful thinking happening about exactly how often people buy free-range eggs.)

But I don’t think that’s the most important takeaway. The most important takeaway is that three-quarters of Americans believe that factory farms are sufficiently wrong that they are trying– however ineffectually– to boycott them.

I would go so far as to argue that studies undercount the number of conflicted omnivores. Most vegans and vegetarians can remember many conversations like this:

Vegetarian: Just so you know, I’m vegetarian, so if you could grill a portobello this weekend at the cookout I would really appreciate it.

Omnivore: You know eating vegetarian isn’t good for you. You can’t get protein from a vegetarian diet.

Vegetarian: [sigh] Actually, I eat plenty of beans, nuts, and soy, but about this weekend–

Omnivore: Why are you vegetarian?

Vegetarian: Well, I’m opposed to conditions in factory farms, but I really don’t want to talk about this now, I want–

Omnivore: Smell this meat! Doesn’t it smell good? Don’t you just want it?

Vegetarian: Actually this is kind of gross after a couple of years of vegetarianism but I really only care about whether I have something to eat this weekend–

Omnivore: What about the plants? That tomato had a FAMILY you know. And LOVED ONES.

Vegetarian: Look, I just want a burger, so can we please—

Omnivore: God, why won’t vegetarians ever shut up about being vegetarian. No one cares.

(Ever wonder who the omnivores are in a conversation? Don’t worry. They’ll fucking tell you.)

And I think the reason this conversation keeps happening is that veganism and vegetarianism are threatening. A Jewish person keeping kosher (for example) is not threatening to goyim, because there is no reasonable ethical argument that we should be avoiding mixing milk and meat. But nearly everyone thinks animal cruelty is wrong: the position that the only ethical problem with torturing a cat is the distress it causes to its owner is held by maybe five philosophers. And many people are uncomfortably aware, on some level, that nearly all farm animals are treated in a way that would get you prison time if you did it to a dog.

But people want to eat animal products. Animal products are part of traditional meals, from turkey on Thanksgiving to eggs on a lazy Sunday morning. For some poor people, they are a cheap source of happiness in a stressful and miserable life. For certain people with some conditions– from autism to eating disorders, from allergies to inflammatory bowel disease– eating meat may be necessary for their health. (Of course, other people with those conditions may be able to be vegan or vegetarian. I myself am a lacto vegetarian autistic.) And most of all they taste good.

It is possible to maintain a web of rationalizations about this. Everyone else is eating meat. Everyone needs meat to be healthy. You only eat humanely raised meat (and let’s not look too closely into what those “free-range” labels really mean). Vegans are weird and obnoxious and cringe-y. But most of all people avoid thinking about it. These rationalizations are very hard to maintain if you think about the subject in detail. And it is terrifying to think that your only options are painful, perhaps impossible, self-sacrifice or going against your values as seriously as animal cruelty goes against most people’s.

Animal Liberation came out in 1975; we have spent the past fifty years trying to convince people not to eat meat. In that time, North American meat consumption per capita has doubled, and global meat consumption has tripled.

I think the reason for this is that it’s very hard to teach people information they actively don’t want to know. People do not want their web of rationalizations to be taken apart.

There are four steps to making an animal advocacy movement that takes conflicted omnivores seriously.

First: we must be welcoming to (non-defensive) conflicted omnivores. It must be clear that vegetarianism is not a requirement to participate in animal advocacy. Some animal advocacy organizations have nondiscrimination policies that include diet; these policies should be more widely adopted. Animal advocacy events with catered food should encourage omnivores with health issues to bring their own food and strongly discourage any sort of negative comment. Prominent omnivores in animal advocacy should come forward and explain what they do to help animals. Interpersonally, you should avoid trying to persuade omnivores in animal advocacy to eat less meat (they know) and should not assume every animal advocate is vegetarian.

Second: we should present a wide variety of asks and not simply tell people to go vegan. For example:

• You can reduce your meat consumption, such as by doing Meatless Mondays or Vegan Before Six.
• You can avoid chicken, eggs, and farmed fish, while eating more beef.
• You can eat more “accidentally vegan” products like Oreos or switch to indistinguishable vegan substitutes such as Just Mayo, Cinnaholic cinnamon rolls, or Earth Balance. (Note to vegans: this requires not lying about whether the food is indistinguishable. Ask your omnivore friends. All my examples are omnivore-approved.)
• You can switch to higher-welfare animal products by making sure to  look for labels which mean something.
• You can sign up for Hen Heroes to put pressure on companies to switch to higher-welfare chickens.
• You can donate to animal advocacy charities.
• You can work for a nonprofit or business which helps animals.
• You can educate yourself and your friends about factory farming.
• You can vote for pro-animal-welfare propositions and politicians who care about animals.
• You can volunteer to help pass pro-animal-welfare propositions.

All of these are important steps which concretely help animals. We need to give conflicted omnivores a way to live in accordance with their values– whether that means political campaigning, putting pressure on corporations, or reducing meat consumption.

Third: we should shift to an institutional focus. A nice thing about institutional change is that you can do it while eating meat. Conflicted omnivores will vote for improved animal welfare. Corporate campaigns— where we pressure companies to switch to buying animals raised in a higher-welfare way– have a use for advocates regardless of their diet. Indeed, omnivores can be more useful here: you can’t boycott the chicken company that went back on its welfare pledge if you don’t eat chicken in the first place.Fourth: welfare improvements are not a permanent solution. The permanent solution is, in fact, to convince omnivores everywhere to permanently switch to a vegan diet. The only way to achieve this goal is with plant-based and cultivated animal products. We need plant-based meat and eggs that taste exactly like animals. In the long run, we need cultivated meat: animal flesh identical to meat on a cellular level but grown in a lab from a small sample of animal cells. The flip side of omnivores being concerned about factory farming but not wanting to make the sacrifices necessary to be vegetarian is that omnivores will become vegetarian when it is no longer a sacrifice. They don’t need convincing; they need an option that lets them live out their values while still enjoying their traditions and their tasty food. If the animal advocacy movement prioritizes that, we can win this thing.

Thirteen Things I Hate About Cthulhu Mythos Stories

I have acquired a special interest in the Cthulhu Mythos lately, so I’ve been reading a lot of short stories set in the Mythos. Some of them, particularly the ones by Lovecraft himself, are very good. Many of them… are less so. Here is a list of (unlucky number thirteen) items that I would like to never see in a Mythos story ever again.

1. “Is the Mythos real… or am I having a psychotic break?” is the worst plotline.

Themes of insanity are a core part of the Mythos, and one of the things that draws me to stories set in it. I love stories of someone going mad from the revelation. However, “am I insane or is this all really happening?” is a boring plot.

Obviously it is going to turn out that the Mythos is real, because you published your story in Weird Tales and not Tales Of Unusually Complex and Rich Psychotic Breaks. The reader is not in any way in suspense about whether the Great Race of Yith actually exists in the world of your story. It is not a reveal when it turns out that (gasp) the Great Race of Yith actually existed all along!

The real problem with these stories is that, as long as the Mythos existing is in question, you can’t explore what it means that the Mythos exists. Do you try to learn as much as you can– even at the cost of your sanity– or do you try to push it all out of your mind? How do you return to normal life having seen the true nature of the universe? Does everyday existence feel meaningless and pointless in the face of the vastness of the cosmos? How do you gather the strength to fight a battle against the eldritch horrors that you know humanity is inevitably going to lose? What are you willing to sacrifice to get humanity a little bit more time?

These are the interesting questions that you cannot address as long as whether the Mythos exists at all is in question.

2. “The protagonist’s best friend who doesn’t believe in the Mythos” is the worst viewpoint character.

The Skeptical Best Friend plotline has all the flaws of the “is the Mythos real… or am I having a psychotic break?” plotline, plus some extra for flavor.

The primary issue with the Skeptical Best Friend as viewpoint character is that there’s basically one story you can tell with the Skeptical Best Friend:

1. The protagonist explains whatever Mythos thing is happening.
2. The skeptical best friend dismisses the protagonist as insane.
3. The protagonist gets devoured.
4. The skeptical best friend wonders if perhaps… it cannot be… but perhaps the Mythos is real…

By the very nature of the Skeptical Best Friend, they can’t desperately try to escape the monster pursuing them though they know getting caught is inevitable, or fear their inevitable transformation into an inhuman creature, or rend their sanity pursuing dark truths, or do much of anything.

I realize that you are trying to give the reader, who is themself perhaps skeptical of the existence of magic, someone to project on. But I think a reader who picks up a volume of Cthulhu Mythos stories is capable of empathizing with an investigator, a cultist, a sorcerer, a hapless victim, or someone else who knows that the supernatural is real and therefore is capable of taking actions about it.

3. No more writer protagonists.

Perhaps following the dictum of “write what you know,” writers of Mythos tales have an unusual tendency to make the protagonists authors, often of stories published in Weird Tales. However, I am absolutely positive that every now and again someone encounters the occult and the eldritch who is not an author. I would like to get to read their stories occasionally too.

4. H. P. Lovecraft should not exist in universe as a character whose short stories are entirely accurate descriptions of what happened in the real world, unless you have a REALLY good explanation.

This is such a specific thing to be in so many Mythos stories, but it recurs a lot and I am baffled by the implications here. What do the readers of Weird Tales think about Lovecraft? He takes actually existing Prohibition raids on small towns and disastrous Antarctic expeditions and… pretends that they’re about weird fish monsters and shoggoths? What? Wouldn’t a reader of Weird Tales think that was incredibly offensive to the people who died?

It also raises many questions about Lovecraft himself. He knows the secret forbidden truths that destroy men’s sanity and chooses to… write fantasy stories about them? Why? Why isn’t he at least writing nonfiction? And then other people are like “hm, this horror story published in Astounding Stories seems like a credible source about the history of Innsmouth”?

You may have Lovecraft be a character in your story if you are addressing these questions. Otherwise, it just destroys my immersion.

5. Christianity should be false.

There are many horror subgenres which can reasonably contain demons, Satanists, and Black Masses. Cosmic horror is not one of them. If demons exist, then it implies that God exists, which implies that the creator of the universe notices each sparrow and cares about each human individually and incarnated as a human to die for our sins. This is antithetical to the entire concept of cosmic horror, which is that we are irrelevant in the face of the universe.

“Satan but no God” is annoying enough, but can be handwaved away as Satan being a Mask of Nyarlathotep or something. More irritating is Christian symbols such as the sign of the cross having power against eldritch horrors. If the sign of the cross defends you against an eldritch horror, then the universe is overseen by an all-loving and all-powerful deity that wants nothing more than to be with you forever in Heaven. This is just completely thematically inappropriate for the Cthulhu Mythos.

6. Do not systematize the horrors beyond our comprehension.

Naturally, humans are going to try to create taxonomies, to predict the Great Old Ones’ behavior, and generally to do empiricism to the cosmic horrors. That’s what humans are about. But our systems should be, at best, abstractions over a more complex reality too vast and too terrible to fit inside any human mind.

We should not be capable of knowing which of the Elder Gods are allies and which are enemies, which had children together, what their goals are, or how they are pursuing their goals. Any time we come up with a system, it should be obvious that the system is at best representing one small part of a more complicated reality. If something is supposed to be a horror beyond our comprehension, we should not be able to understand it.

(Shoutout to the podcast The Magnus Archives, which while non-Mythos does this very well. Highly recommended to all fans of cosmic horror.)

7. No wars of good versus evil, DERLETH.

August Derleth had one good idea, which is that the Cthulhu Mythos should be its own thing instead of just a tendency for Lovecraft to reference his other stories when writing fiction. Then, satisfied, Derleth retired from having good ideas for the rest of his life.

The Cthulhu Mythos should not be a battle between the evil Great Old Ones and the good Elder Gods. Cosmic horrors are beyond all human notions of morality, because they are fundamentally inhuman and incomprehensible.

8. NO ELEMENTAL ASSOCIATIONS, DERLETH

Water. Earth. Fire. Air. Long ago, the Great Old Ones lived in harmony. Then everything changed when Cthugha attacked.

Seriously, why would you decide that Hastur needs to be an elemental spirit of air? This is the Mythos, not a New Age shop. When I hear “Hastur is the elemental spirit of air,” I immediately imagine a nice hippie lady with a floral dress and a Tarot deck who wants to read my aura and unblock my chakras. Then I think about the dozens and dozens of mediocre and entirely non-horrific fantasy novels which have used elemental associations. Then I start asking myself why Galen was right about the secret underlying nature of the universe. Galen was not in any way an occultist and also he thought the uterus was a scrotum turned inside out. Why does he know about the basic four categories which govern the Great Old Ones themselves?

If you must have elemental associations, you can take a page out of Trail of Cthulhu’s book and make Cthulhu the elemental spirit of gravity instead.

9. Make your tomes in some way different from the Necronomicon.

Insufficient differentiation is a problem in the Mythos in general. There are quite a lot of Great Old Ones where it is unclear how they are at all different from Azathoth or Cthulhu. But this is less objectionable because maybe our limited mortal minds just can’t understand the exact distinction between Gol-Goroth and Tsathoggua.

On the other hand, our limited mortal minds can understand books. And every Mythos author has decided to add their own tome, the dread Whatever with the yellowing pages that is probably in Latin or Greek or Arabic or something and that contains secrets humankind was not meant to know. However, most of these tomes could be easily replaced with the Necronomicon and nothing of value would be lost.

The problem is that, perhaps to maintain flexibility, the authors do not specify what sort of information is in their tomes. But that means that the books get rather same-y after a while. The solution is to differentiate. Maybe this tome specializes in the secrets of necromancy: speaking to, summoning, and resurrecting the dead. Maybe it is the holy text of one particular cult and has little on any Great Old Ones the cult doesn’t worship. Perhaps it is a work of astrology that focuses on knowing exactly when the stars are right. Perhaps it is a history of the Black Pharaoh’s reign in Egypt. There are a lot of interesting options to make your tome unique.

10. Before you describe something as an unknowably evil horror, check that it is actually an unknowably evil horror, and not instead a totally knowable horror.

I understand that it is a genre convention that there are unknowable horrors from beyond time. We can describe the protagonist’s reaction, but the English language is insufficient to convey the enormity and majesty of the Great Old Ones. And I love it when authors describe seemingly mundane items– like the tiara in Shadow Over Innsmouth– as being alien and horrific in a way the narrator simply can’t put words to. The idea that we simply cannot comprehend most of what is happening in the universe is fundamental to the Mythos.

But before you invoke this trope, you need to check whether your horror is actually indescribable, like a Deep One’s tiara or Shub-Niggurath, or in fact it is perfectly describable, like a severed hand crawling around on its own. Severed hands crawling around on their own are gross and freaky, but I feel like I am capable of visualizing such a hand and understanding why I would be horrified if I saw one. If your narrator is telling me endlessly how spooky the hand is, I’m not going to be scared. I’m just going to be bored.

11. You should not write entire paragraphs in italics.

Italicizing an entire paragraph does not make it scarier. It just makes you seem worried that your writing won’t stand on its own so you have to use typography to indicate to the reader that this is the scary part–!

12. No long racist screeds.

Look, I am a reasonable person here. I am not demanding an end to miscegenation horror in the Mythos. I can accept that I am going to have to put up with a certain number of references to barbaric primitive tribes, Negro savages, and the natural strength and courage of the Aryan race. This is what happens when you like a fandom started by a racist in the 1930s. Society marches on.

However, I feel that when I am picking up a Cthulhu Mythos story, less than twenty percent of it should be composed of sympathetic characters discussing the latest cutting-edge findings of scientific racism. In general, if you place a Mythos story and the chatlogs of an alt-right chatroom side by side, I should be able to distinguish them in some way other than the number of times the speakers say the word “cuck.”

(Lovecraft gets a bad rap for racism but honestly the worst offender here in my opinion is Robert E. Howard. Lovecraft does not have any stories nearly as bad as The Children of the Night.)

13. No takes on the Mythos that are exclusively “Lovecraft is racist.”

I am stirring up a hornet’s nest here, I realize. But there’s a lot of really great material in the Mythos. And a lot of the nuggets of gold are there on the ground for anyone to pick up, because instead of mining them everyone else has spent the past ninety years writing about Skeptical Best Friends and making Cthulhu a water spirit.

It is baffling to me why so many people have looked at all of the untapped material here and decided to go with writing books about how Lovecraft is really racist.

I agree! Lovecraft was a racist person and this pervades the entire Mythos. As fans of the Mythos, we should acknowledge this. I am not opposed to books exploring the racial themes of the Mythos existing. But I think that we should explore all the other fascinating material that hasn’t really been touched on. What is it like to grow up as a member of the cult of Cthulhu? Why do people worship the Great Old Ones (and, no, “insanity” is not a good answer)? What is it like to be a Deep One hybrid and slowly transform into something repulsive and alien? How do investigators cope with the trauma of living in a cosmic horror setting? How does a person readjust to normal life after being captured by the Great Race of Yith? What clever schemes can you come up with to elude the Hounds of Tindalos? There’s so much potential to explore themes of trauma and abuse and complicity and neurodivergence and wonder at the tremendous scale of the universe.

Sure, write your book about how Lovecraft is racist. But do other stuff with the Mythos too.

Sanity House Rules for Call of Cthulhu 7E

These are my house rules for handling Sanity in Call of Cthulhu 7e. Most of the rules are not strictly speaking new rules; the mechanics basically work the same. However, I have rewritten and clarified the fluff, and made some things simpler. I believe my changes make the sanity system into a simple yet flexible system for handling trauma.

Losing Sanity

In my version, the Call of Cthulhu sanity system specifically handles trauma. Characters who have other neurodivergences do not start with a lower sanity score. Their experiences are roleplayed out and do not interact with the Sanity system. (This includes characters with compulsions, fears, anxieties, or addictions which are not caused by trauma.)

Conversely, traumatized characters may begin with Phobias or Manias at the start of the game. (I have chosen to capitalize Phobia and Mania when referring to the game mechanics, so that they are clearly different from phobias and manias the mental health conditions.)

The Call of Cthulhu states that you can lose Sanity from non-Mythos sources, but does not provide guidance about how much Sanity you lose from various non-Mythos sources. I drew inspiration from Trail of Cthulhu’s Stability system to create the following chart (before the slash is Sanity loss on a success, after is Sanity loss on a failure):

0/1D2: Find mutilated animal corpse.

0/1D3: Find corpse or body part; witness a killing.

1/1D3: A human being tries to harm you; car accident; witness torture; psychotic break not caused by insanity.

0/1D4: Non-threatening omens; grisly corpse or crime scene; human being attacks you with intent to kill; you kill someone in a fight.

0/1D4+1: See many corpses or a large battle; find out a loved one or Significant Person has died; week in solitary confinement; bitten by a vampire.

1/1D4+1: Kill someone in cold blood; torture someone; find the corpse of a loved one or Significant Person; attacked by a loved one or Significant Person (who wouldn’t attack you normally); threatening omen or magical effect.

0/1D6: Witness death of friend or Significant Person; torture someone for an hour or longer; discover you have committed accidental cannibalism; awaken trapped in a coffin; see “normal” supernatural creature (mi-go, deep one, ghoul, skeleton, etc); see Bast

0/1D6 +1: Talk to someone you know to be dead; be possessed by an outside force.

1/1D6+1: Witness gruesome death of friend or Significant Person; kill friend or Significant Person; undergo torture.

0/1D8: See Yig or a zombie; see a werewolf change shape.

0/1D10: Undergo severe torture.

1/1D10: See a corpse rise from its grave; see Father Dagon or Mother Hydra.

1D3/1D10: see Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath, Hound of Tindalos, King in Yellow, etc.

1D6/1D10: see shuggoth.

2/2D10+1: Witness giant severed head falling from the sky, or similar gruesome, incomprehensible, supernatural event.

1D3/1D20: see Gla’aki

1D10/1D100: See Great Cthulhu, Azathoth, Hastur, Nyaralathotep, Shub-Niggurath, etc.

Because of the increased number of things the PCs can lose sanity from, I have expanded monster sanity limits to apply to all discrete sources of sanity loss. (That is, in one scenario, you can lose no more than 4 Sanity from being attacked by a human with intent to kill.)

I think the list also helps calibrate exactly how bad seeing Mythos creatures are: even seeing a creature as relatively ordinary as a Deep One is as mind-scarring as torturing someone for more than an hour.

Going Insane

I typically give my players control over their actions when insane. While I would take over if they abused the privilege, I find that the depth and richness of playing an insane character more than compensates for the risk that a power gamer would declare themself to have a Phobia of oceans when the entire game takes place in the Sahara Desert. 

Insanity in Call of Cthulhu has five mechanical effects: bouts of madness; Phobias and Manias; delusions; corruption of backstory elements; and different results of fumbles.

I do require my players to roll on the appropriate table to determine their behavior when they have a bout of madness. I think the loss of control helps cement the helplessness of insanity and (unlike the other insanity-related tables in the game) the bout of madness table is rather good.

Corrupting backstory elements also works well following the rules as written, although again I allow my players to corrupt their own backstory elements.

Phobias and Manias should not be understood as literal phobias and literal manias. The examples in the book are at best bland and at worst nonsensical. (Who responds to trauma by acquiring a special interest in trains?)  Instead, we should understand a Phobia as anything that the character avoids because of their trauma, and a Mania as anything that the character seeks out because of their trauma.

Interpreted in this way, the Phobias and Manias system can accommodate a wide range of reactions to trauma depending on the experiences and personality of the individual character. Phobias do not all need to be fears: anorexia may be modeled mechanically as a Phobia of food, and hypersensitivity to noises may be modeled as a Phobia of loud noises. Some fears may be more conceptual than the ones presented in the book: for example, a religious character may have a Phobia of going to hell because of the evil deeds they have performed.

Similarly, a Mania can be any number of different things. Some Manias will be compulsive behavior, like rocking back and forth while muttering to yourself or being unable to stop writing out quotes from the Necronomicon on the walls. (Some compulsive behavior, like constant twitching, is in my opinion best handled through corruption of the Description backstory element.) Some Manias may be attempts to keep yourself safe: for example, a Mania for sitting with your back to the wall so no one can sneak up on you or a Mania for carrying a gun with you wherever you go. Other Manias may, again, be more conceptual: a Mania for making sure that everyone you love is safe, for example, or a Mania for being liked by everyone you encounter so they don’t hurt you, or a Mania for never making anyone angry. Some Manias may be coping mechanisms or ways to numb overwhelming feelings: for example, addictions, alcoholism, compulsive sex, self-harm, risky behavior such as skydiving or reckless driving, religion, or overspending are all good Manias.

Because of the diversity of potential Phobias and Manias, I suggest the Keeper or the player (whoever will be choosing the Phobia or Mania) spend some time in advance thinking about what Phobias or Manias are appropriate for the character, so that the game doesn’t stall while they’re trying to think of one immediately after seeing Great Cthulhu.

Delusions are one of the most fun rules in Call of Cthulhu. The Keeper is permitted to lie to the players about their characters’ perceptions and the results of rolls. I encourage Keepers to pay attention to the players’ corrupted backstory elements, Phobias, Manias, and the triggers of their insanity to figure out appropriate delusions. Do not consider yourself limited to the examples in the book, which mostly involve hallucinating Mythos horrors. Instead, consider: should a successful Psychology roll tell the PC that that NPC secretly hates them? Should that Spot Hidden check reveal that an unarmed stranger is secretly holding a gun? Should Listen enable you to overhear people talking behind your back? There are lots of excellent opportunities to mimic the cognitive distortions associated with untreated trauma.

Finally, insane characters receive different results on failed pushed rolls or on fumbles: a sane character who fumbles a Jump check might fall off the cliff, while an insane character will acquire a delusion that they can fly. This is profoundly stupid and in my opinion takes away from the somber and horrific tone of Call of Cthulhu. I am baffled about why traumatized people apparently cannot fall off cliffs. I suggest that the Keeper keep the character’s insanity in mind when deciding on results of a fumble or a failed pushed roll, but otherwise be willing to give the same results they do to a sane character.

Regaining Sanity

Call of Cthulhu has an endearing and heartwarming faith in the capabilities of the 1920s psychiatric establishment to heal trauma. For this reason, I have modified the rules heavily.

In my interpretation, Psychoanalysis is no longer the skill of performing Freudian psychoanalysis on patients. Instead, Psychoanalysis is the skill of helping traumatized people recover from their trauma, usually learned through trial and error or personal experience. For this reason, Psychoanalysis is now an occupational skill for members of the clergy (replacing Listen). Many other characters may take Psychoanalysis with a reasonable justification: for example, the character who has Psychoanalysis in my current game is a Tarot card reader. 

Similarly, indefinite insanity is no longer cured by spending time in asylums or under psychiatric care. Instead, indefinite insanity is cured by spending a month in a quiet, safe, comfortable location where nothing especially stressful happens. This may be an asylum, if the asylum is doing its job; however, your house back at home is just as good.

I didn’t change the rules for backstory connections, but I’d like to express how much I like them as a way of modeling recovery from trauma. The PCs regain sanity (that is, coping ability) through spending time with things and people that matter to them. The system reflects the diversity that actual traumatized people have in their self-care techniques: I have PCs that regain sanity from telling stories, performing corde lisse, playing music, talking to their brother, and curling up in a corner while wearing a very large jacket with lots of pockets. There are really great roleplaying opportunities in the PCs responding to experiencing violence by each seeking out their own tools for self-care.

But as you become more traumatized, these supports become more difficult for you to access. You’re more likely to fail rolls to recover sanity if your sanity is already low, and the corruption of your backstory elements means you have fewer and fewer things you can really rely on to comfort you. Experiencing extreme trauma can force you into a cycle it is hard to escape from.

Tomes

Normally, in Call of Cthulhu, you automatically lose sanity as soon as you read a tome. However, I am running a version of the Alexandrian Remix of Eternal Lies adapted to Call of Cthulhu. (Players, DO NOT click that link.) In this remix, the characters are supposed to read sixteen books. Following the rules as written, reading sixteen Mythos tomes is going to drive even the sanest PCs mad from the revelation, which makes the remix unplayable.

The fix is simple. Tomes now function like any other source of sanity loss, and you make a Sanity check every time you read them. The Sanity loss given in the Keeper’s Handbook is the Sanity you lose on a failed check. However, if you study a tome fully during downtime, you will automatically lose the Sanity cost of reading it. 

Following the Alexandrian’s example, I incentivized my PCs rereading the tomes by giving them bonus dice to certain Library Use and other research rolls when consulting particular tomes. (For example, a tome about Nyarlathotep might give you a bonus die to all research involving Nyarlathotep.) The most powerful tomes with the most useful bonus dice have the highest Sanity loss.

To adapt the Trail of Cthulhu tome rules to Call of Cthulhu, I implemented a ‘skimming’ rule. If the PCs skim a book, they make a Sanity check, get a handout with a general sense of the book’s contents, and usually know which research rolls they would get bonus dice to by consulting it. However, they do not gain Cthulhu Mythos or spells, which require further study and loss of SAN.

Strawmanny Questions About Genital Preference, Part Two

[source]

6) are people who are only attracted to others of the same sex morally obligated to feel ashamed of this?

You are not actually morally obligated to feel ashamed of anything.

7a) if penises are female genitals, why do trans women experience physical dysphoria?

So there are two answers to this question.

First, many trans people experience physical dysphoria as the primary symptom of their transness. It’s not that they are upset about not being women; it is that they want a vagina and breasts and an estrogen-dominant hormone system, and it turns out if you try to obtain all those things while insisting you’re a man a bunch of people are going to look at you funny. You can come up with various theories for why this is, but we don’t really understand why people are trans.

Second, different people have different feelings about their body’s sexed characteristics. You can see this in cis people. Some cis women feel that pregnancy and giving birth is a definitively female thing, the miracle of creating life, a source of deep connection to all other birthing women throughout history and a beautiful affirmation of their body’s strength and power. Some cis women read that previous sentence and strongly considered a home hysterectomy with a rusty spoon.

More broadly, different cis women have different feelings about womanhood. Some women feel a sense of connection to admirable women of the past, like they’re all on the same team and in some sense share achievements. Some women enjoy chivalry or gendered flirtation. Some women are proud of specifically being a woman in math or science. Some women love being mothers specifically; their sense of womanhood is connected to having children. Some women’s experience of womanhood is suffering: sexual harassment, the fear of sexual violence, unfair divisions of labor, and entitled men. Some women like their clothes to make them feel cute and adorable; others, sexy and enticing; others, handsome and butch; still others would prefer their clothes not to send any gendered messages at all, thank you. And some women would prefer not to interact with gender at all and wish that it would just go away and people would stop assigning gendered meanings to skirts, raising kids, or being a mathematician.

You can say that this is bad and in a perfect feminist utopia that no women would have any feelings about their womanhood other than the Approved Feminist Feelings ™. Setting aside for a moment whether that would be either good or possible, it is clearly not true in the present day. You wouldn’t go around to all cis women and go “actually, it is wrong to be proud of being a woman in math, the Approved Feminist Feeling is that you are not allowed to care about this” or “actually, you need to appreciate the way your menstrual period connects you to the cycle of the moon, because it is the Approved Feminist Feeling”– at least I hope not. Can we assign the same standards to trans women that we do to cis women?

Trans women also have a range of different feelings about their body’s sexed characteristics. Some trans women are distressed by having a body part so closely associated with men. Some trans women like their penises and are happy to be women with dicks. Some trans women disliked their penises when they functioned in the typical fashion, but when they went on HRT they traded erections for multiple orgasms and now they’re okay with the situation. Some trans women dislike their dicks but have made peace with them. Some trans women don’t care about their dicks for themselves, but would like to have receptive PIV or date people who aren’t attracted to penises or otherwise do something that a vagina is helpful for.

Penises are typically male body parts. Any woman is going to have complicated feelings about having typically male body parts; just ask any cis woman who grows facial hair! We do not typically go up to cis women and go “some women grow facial hair, so why are you unhappy about having facial hair? You should be comfortable letting your mustache grow naturally and should stop waxing it.” So I think we should have similar attitudes towards trans women.

7b) why is sex reassignment surgery called ‘gender affirmation surgery’?

We live in a culture where penises are strongly associated with men and vaginas with women. One could imagine a culture in which that is not true (perhaps a transhumanist world with easy genderswapping?) but in this world it is.

For this reason, many women with penises will find it gender-affirming to no longer have a penis. Again, cis women have a variety of feelings about having sexed body parts typically associated with men; why wouldn’t trans women have a similar diversity of feelings?

7c) why do we encourage surgery rather than encouraging trans people to make peace with their bodies and overcome the cissexism they’ve internalized that tells them that their genitals don’t match their gender?

Let’s say for the sake of argument that I could make peace with my body and overcome my cissexism through a year of therapy. That would cost about $6500, an hour of my time every week for therapy plus transit time, and maybe twenty minutes a day of therapy homework.

Or I could get surgery and fix the problem. My top surgery cost about three thousand dollars, I had two days of sleeping a lot, five days of taking it easy, and I was completely back to my normal activities a week later. And then my top dysphoria went away permanently. 

One of these seems significantly less costly than the other. Like, more power to you if you want to try the therapy approach, but surgery’s great. I wish I could fix all my mental health problems this easily!

Some trans communities are toxic, but most communities I’m in don’t encourage or discourage surgery. They lay it out as one of many possible options for treating dysphoria. That’s what “some women have penises” is fundamentally about: not coercing people who don’t like dick into liking dick, but allowing people to make their own choices about whether the costs of surgery are right for them.

If you want to learn to accept your body as it is, without physical transition, most trans communities I know are fine with this. (Not all, of course! Some are awful. But most.) Conversely, in anti-trans circles I quite often see people say things along the lines of “I supported trans people until I found out some of them don’t even get the surgery” or “why are you identifying as trans if you’re not even making an effort” or “trans people who aren’t on hormones are fakers just doing it for the attention.” It is puzzling to me why a group of people would spend half its time talking about how transition medicine is disgusting and has many inevitable complications and will ruin your life, and the other half complaining that people don’t want to do it.

Also, it is painfully obvious to me that when you think “trans people” you think of trans women, because trans men are already doing the thing you want them to do.

Trans men have basically three options as regards genitalia: they can stick with their original equipment; they can get metoidoplasty, which leaves them with a micropenis which can’t ejaculate; or they can get phalloplasty, which leaves you with a penis that appears similar to the cis male penis but generally requires multiple surgeries, has a higher risk of complication, often reduces sensation, doesn’t allow for spontaneous erections, and still can’t ejaculate.

(Conversely, the state of the art for vaginoplasty is very good: a post-vaginoplasty vagina usually functions similarly to a natal vagina, except that you can’t get pregnant or have periods. And the second one most people are fine with anyway.)

So in practice whatever option trans men end up getting they have to come to terms with the fact that their genitals are very much different than cis men’s.

So we know what happens if you get a lot of trans people to try to accept their bodies as they are. 

You can come to terms with it and accept that your body works the way it does– just like we accept bad knees and back pain and weird moles and all the other pains and indignities that come with living with a human body. But accepting and making peace with something doesn’t mean you like it. For some trans men, their genitalia are a source of constant pain and dissociation; for others, it is something they can live with; still others learn to like them. In many cases, it takes quite a lot of effort compared to hypothetical surgery.  

8a) in a world without gender (ie. if everybody identified as agender), would gay people cease to exist? would gay culture cease to exist? if not, why not?

Presumably there would continue to be people who have preferences for certain sexed body types, but they would not identify themselves as “gay”, any more than people who have preferences for curly-haired people identify themselves as “curlysexual.” If sex and gender are not categories that society cares about, it would be really weird if one’s sexual preferences related to sex are a category people care about. For similar reasons, gay culture would certainly stop existing; there would be no reason for anyone to distinguish between gays and straights.

I expect that more people would be what we would call bisexual, perhaps more than half. Many people would have a preference for one body type or another, but occasionally have an interest of people in a different body type, without being particularly bothered or upset by this– as in our society, people who are usually attracted to curly-haired people are not particularly bothered or upset by being attracted to the odd person with straight hair.

8b) if so, would this be a favourable outcome?

I don’t know! There are a lot of considerations in many different directions. On one hand, our current system of gender harms many people: gender policing and stigma against the gender-non-conforming; gender roles which take away people’s basic human rights, such as the rights to eat, not to be raped, to choose who to marry, to make their own reproductive decisions, and to be educated; and the difficult-to-measure harm of gender itself. How many people are worse because we taught them that courage is a man’s virtue and kindness a woman’s? How many men flinch away from an innocent pleasure because it’s girly? How many women struggle with shame because they cannot live up to our culture’s impossible standards of womanhood?

Still, gender is something that brings many people joy. The chivalrous butch dyke in her suit, pulling out the chair for her ladyfriend, knows this as well as the most conservative of Christians. And I do feel a sense of loss at the idea that this agender future would have no comprehension of gay culture.

Would I press a button to go to this world? Sure, of course. No number of dapper butches is worth a young girl getting raped. But I remain hopeful that perhaps we can have the good parts of gender without the bad.

9a) are all women born without genital preferences? is an interest in penises a part of tabula rasa female existence?

As I discussed in the previous part, I don’t believe in tabula rasa female experience. When people are born, they presumably do not have any preferences about what genitals people they’re having sex with should have, because they are babies. Once a person is of an age to start having opinions on the subject, they have been raised in a culture, which has influenced them. In principle, you could describe how people with particular genes behave in any culture they could conceivably be raised in. But you could not answer what they would be like if they were not raised in a culture at all, because barring horrible neglect this is not a thing that happens to human beings.

(How are these hypothetical people raised without a culture supposed to even know what a penis is?)

This question is exactly as incoherent as “if women didn’t have genes, what would the culture influence them to do?” Nothing! They wouldn’t exist!

9b) if we examine the root of our repulsion towards penises and, indeed, all male sex characteristics, is the correct answer that deep down, we were attracted to them all along? is that the conclusion we are supposed to come to?

9c) if not, what is?

I mean, I don’t know what people on Twitter are up to these days, but my opinion is that you can’t force yourself to be attracted to anything. I feel that it is generally a good idea to stay open-minded in sex as in food or books. If you find yourself attracted to one particular male sex characteristic– not even on a trans girl, perhaps you get a crush on a cis girl with a mastectomy, who knows– then I think it’s better to go “oh, hey, cool” than to freak out about it. And I think it is best to avoid being prejudiced. But some people are not prejudiced and are perfectly open-minded and will still never find themselves attracted to anyone who has had a mastectomy. The cunt wants what it wants. Who cares.

If you are actually repulsed by all male sex characteristics possibly you should go see a therapist about that, I can’t imagine that it’s a good way to go through life feeling like you want to vomit every time you see a beard. But I suspect that this is probably an exaggeration.

10a) if the only way to eradicate genital preference in a woman was through exploration of gender theory and re-framing of her perceptions of what it means to be a man or woman, would this be an appropriate response?

uh, sure? if she wants to?

10b) if the only way to eradicate genital preference in a woman was through damaging her opportunities to access employment, housing, and social support networks as a response to non-compliance, would this be an appropriate response?

no!

10c) if the only way to eradicate genital preference in a woman was through re-education at a dedicated facility, would this be an appropriate response?

this seems like kind of overkill, honestly, but if it’s fully consensual and uncoerced, and she’s informed of success rates, then why not? People have a right to try to alter their sexualities if they want to.

10d) if the only way to eradicate genital preference in a woman was through aversion therapy — inducing, for example, intense self-loathing and worthlessness in response to undesirable feelings– would this be an appropriate response?

no!!!!!!

10e) if the only way to eradicate genital preference in a woman was through electroshock therapy, would this be an appropriate response?

NO!!!!!!!!!!

10f) if the only way to eradicate genital preference in a woman was through internment followed by six months of brothel work followed by murder, would this be an appropriate response?

WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU

10g) if not, why not?

uh I am not sure how to explain to you that murder is wrong

Thing of Things Social Media

After several years of procrastinating, I have made a Facebook page for Thing of Things. Like it on Facebook to have my posts show up in your Facebook feed and to conveniently be able to share it. The page will contain absolutely nothing except notifications of new posts.

You may also follow me on Twitter, where notifications of new posts are interspersed with retweets of people saying important things, opinions on dumb Internet drama, the adventures of my Call of Cthulhu group, and cute stories about my two-year-old. (Last night we put all of his books away on shelves and he spent ten minutes carefully picking up each of the books and moving it to his bedroom floor where it belongs.)

Some Observations Concerning Medication Side Effects, And A Warning About Cognitive Impairment

[Note: this blog post was edited after publication because I realized I’d accidentally published an early draft.]

Often, doctors can only find out about side effects of medications if patients tell them. While some side effects are easily observed (like tremors) or visible on blood tests (like poor kidney function), many are only known to the patient (such as pain or nausea) or only easy to observe if you are with the patient for more than an hour every few months (such as emotional changes or fatigue). I only have anecdotes– so take this post with a grain of salt– but I think this systematically distorts the information people receive from their doctors about the side effects of medications.

Doctors love telling people about weight gain as a side effect of medication. It doesn’t matter if you are underweight, have unintentionally lost a seventh of your body weight in the past three weeks, or are literally dying, doctors will warn you that weight gain is a side effect of your medication so you must diet and exercise. In my experience, doctors are not nearly as assiduous about warning people about side effects that are a good deal more life-ruining than weight gain: fatigue, insomnia, suicidal ideation, or even addiction risk. (Of course, doctors being terrible about drugs with addiction risk goes both ways; for every person who is prescribed benzos without an appropriate warning there’s someone else taken off a medication that works well for them.)

Some of this, of course, is medical fatphobia. But I suspect a lot of it is that weight gain is one of only a small number of very common medication side effects that are completely visible to the doctor. You can see whether a patient has gained weight; it is not dependent on the patient noticing the weight gain, connecting it to the medication, and deciding to complain to the doctor about it. Naturally, weight gain is more salient.

The flipside of this is also true: if a medication has a side effect that is not visible to doctors, and patients don’t tell their doctors about it, it will be much much much less salient to doctors. The well-known example of this is sexual side effects with antidepressants. In the sixties and seventies, it was believed that sexual side effects with antidepressants were rare. Today we know that about forty percent of people treated with an antidepressant will have sexual side effects; for drugs that have a particularly high rate of sexual side effects, as many as seventy percent of people may experience side effects. Why did doctors fail to notice something forty percent of their patients experienced? Probably because– since sexual side effects are a very personal and embarrassing issue– their patients were too embarrassed to tell them.

But the more serious issue is cognitive impairment.

I personally have met at least five different people who experienced serious cognitive impairment when they took a medication, were not warned that this was a side effect, and did not realize that they were experiencing cognitive impairment until they stopped taking it. In no case did their doctors realize they were experiencing cognitive impairment.

A doctor talks to you, at most, for an hour or so once every couple of months. Many people can appear normal in a relatively scripted conversation for an hour, even if they have very serious cognitive issues. I know people who lost the ability to read books or to focus on a television show, people whose emotions were so deadened that they felt like they were p-zombies, people who couldn’t remember what had happened to them yesterday, people who could no longer connect effects with causes.

(All of my friends are quite young. A terrifying reality is that a doctor might notice medication-induced cognitive impairment in an elderly person and attribute it to the natural decline of old age. Doctors are aware of this, but as far as I know no one has a great solution to the problem.)

A friend of mine, Nicholas Rabinowicz, writes about his experience on antipsychotics:

A few years ago, I spent a week in a psych ward. While I was there, I was put on Risperdal. I was not told that it was an antipsychotic, or really anything else about it.
Within a couple days I started having near-constant headaches, but was told to stay on the medication and this side effect would eventually pass. (It stayed for the entire time I was on Risperdal.)

When I was discharged, I was able to look up Risperdal… and that was it. I could not read so much as a sentence at a time of the Wikipedia article on it. Someone else had to break it into smaller chunks for me, and this is how I finally learned that I was taking an antipsychotic.

I want to say that I then decided I had to stop taking it, but the truth is that I had already decided that when the headaches started. And I’m very lucky that I did, because without that I would not have been able to take actions to get off them. I was no longer capable of conceptualizing the idea that I could just stop taking them. I spent multiple months begging doctors to take me off them, and I was only able to do this because I had already been doing so when the cognitive effects started. Simply put, all I had on my side was inertia.

It was not until after I got off the medication that I was horrified at what had been done to me. I had not been capable of understanding until then. Everything except the headaches had seemed so normal.

This is a fairly typical example of what antipsychotic-induced cognitive impairment feels like from the inside.

And this is the real difficulty with cognitive impairment. Sexual side effects are embarrassing and uncomfortable to bring up, but they don’t make it impossible for you to notice the existence of sexual side effects. Cognitive impairment can and does disrupt the skills required to notice and take action about cognitive impairment: the memory that lets you realize that today isn’t just a particularly slow day; the meta-cognition that lets you notice that you’re not thinking the way you used to; the causal reasoning that allows you to connect it to your medication; the planning abilities that let you schedule an appointment with your doctor and complain; the feelings that make you believe that feeling like this is a bad thing.

I wish I had some recommendations for best practices to avoid this extremely terrifying outcome. Unfortunately, all I have is anecdotes, and I do not have an anecdote of someone who tried to notice cognitive impairment and succeeded. However, I would like to urge everyone– doctors and patients– to be more aware of the possibility of undetected cognitive impairment when people are taking drugs known to cause cognitive impairment.

Patients and loved ones of patients, be aware that the doctor may not tell you whether drugs cause cognitive impairment. Read the information that comes from the pharmacy carefully to see if there are any side effects that might disrupt your ability to notice side effects. If they do, ask your friends and loved ones to keep an eye out for uncharacteristic changes in behavior that might be a sign that you can’t notice whether your brain is working right.

If you are on antipsychotics, please send this article to a friend of yours right now, in case you fail to process your conclusions from the article.

Medical professionals, you are very plausibly missing a lot of very bad side effects of drugs! I am not sure what to do about this but I feel like it is worth trying to make you aware of this possibility.

Hugo Awards Finalists That Are Worth Reading

Short Story

Do Not Look Back, My Lion: A heartbreaking anti-war story, featuring lesbians and bizarre gender worldbuilding. This is what tragedy can be at its best: cathartic, transcendent, sublime. Highly recommended.

As The Last I May Know: The codes to use an apocalyptic superweapon are implanted in the heart of a child; to use them to defeat an enemy, the president must first kill the child with his bare hands. The story is told from the point of view of that child. I recommend setting aside some time to cry afterward.

And Now His Lordship Is Laughing: Horror-fantasy set during the Bengali famine, which is both a summary and a content warning. Reads like a particularly good The Magnus Archives statement, for those of you who are into that podcast.

Novelette

Omphalos: One of two stories Ted Chiang published this year! Set in a world where it is provably scientifically known that God created the world ex nihilo six thousand years ago; the worldbuilding is clever and well-thought-out, full of “of course it had to be that way” details. A profound and thoughtful exploration of finding meaning in a purposeless world. I broke down crying at the end.

For He Can Creep: A whimsical and charming story about Jeoffry, a cat who belongs to a poet, and his fight with the Devil in order to prevent the Devil from keeping his master from finishing his poetry. Jeoffrey’s voice is strong and clear, and the sentences are hilarious. If you like cats you’ll enjoy this one.

Novella

To Be Taught If Fortunate: Becky Chambers returns with another slice-of-life science fiction novella, this time set among some of the first astronauts traveling to exoplanets to explore alien life. Chambers is rigorously biologically accurate (at least to my layperson’s eye) and clearly fascinated by the details of biology. Plot happens– sort of– but Chambers is clearly far more interested in the intricacies of what it would be like to discover nonsapient aliens. If you prefer that your science fiction novels be mostly about what it implies about evolution that alien microbes use both chiralities, this will be up your alley. It also features some of the most stirring pro-space-exploration sentiment I have read this year.

The Deep: Adapted from clipping’s Hugo-nominated song of the same name. (clipping is Daveed Diggs’s band, and if you like Hamilton you should check them out.) If you enjoy a well-characterized autistic protagonist, a weird take on mermaids, and themes of remembrance of history in the wake of generational trauma, you might enjoy this. Unfortunately, strips out a lot of the Lovecraftian themes which I appreciated so much in the original song.

Anxiety is the Dizziness of Freedom: One of the two stories Ted Chiang published this year. As always, absolutely brilliant. A technology is developed which allows you to talk to versions of yourself who made one decision differently. Most of the book is devoted to the consequences of the technological development for society: support groups for people who found they made the wrong choice; the millions of dollars people are willing to spend on being able to see their deceased loved ones in alternate universes one last time. It concludes with a heart-warming affirmation of individual choice. Both Anxiety and Omphalos are much less depressing than usual Chiang and it is making me wonder if someone slipped him an antidepressant.

Novel

The City In The Middle Of The Night: My one-sentence summary is “YA dystopia but actually, like, good.” The character development is thoughtful and rich, and common dystopian tropes are subverted cleverly. Set in the twilight part of a tidally locked planet, the setting explores the concept of time. In totalitarian Xiosphant, everyone eats, sleeps, and works at the exact same time, or is severely punished for being late. In anarchic Argelo, you sleep and wake and work whenever you feel like it– or don’t. The alien species has its own unique relationship to time which I won’t spoil. The cities are richly detailed, with clever and true-to-life details, and yet the thematic unity makes it all hang together.

A Memory Called Empire: Written by a historian, and it shows. The Aztec/Byzantine mashup that is the Teixcalaanli Empire should not work as well as it does. The protagonist, Mahit Dzmare, is the new ambassador to the Teixcalaanli Empire. Like many people from her home, Lsel Station, she carries around the memories and personality of her predecessor in a device called an imago. But her predecessor’s imago is twenty years out of date– and he’s gotten up to a lot of shenanigans since then. If you enjoy political intrigue, rich worldbuilding, fast-paced and gripping plotting, people constantly quoting poetry at each other, and characters who arrange their elaborate betrayals to be a reference to classic epic poetry, you’ll like A Memory Called Empire.

Related Work

Becoming Superman: The serendipitous discoveries are one of the reasons I read the Hugo nominees each year. I would never have picked up J. Michael Straczynski’s memoir on my own, but it’s probably my favorite book so far this year. Straczynski was diagnosed with reactive attachment disorder after an astonishingly abusive childhood. His memoir is the story of a person in the general cluster B/CPTSD/reactive attachment disorder cluster striving to overcome the lessons he was taught in childhood in order to become a better person. (The better person is Superman.) I found it comforting, validating, reassuring, and hilarious; I recommend it to anyone in that cluster or who loves someone in that cluster. Also, frankly, it’s just great to see Straczynski live the dream by outing his abusive father as a literal Nazi war criminal. Vengeance is sweet.

Young Adult Book

Catfishing On CatNet: Cat Pictures Please is now a novel and it is every bit as good as the original short story. I assume this is a sufficient pitch.

Dragon Pearl: This is the first book I’ve read in the Rick Riordan Presents line, and it’s definitely making me want to check out more of them. Dragon Pearl is science fantasy in the best and goofiest way possible, a space opera set in a world where Korean mythology is literally true. The protagonist is a kumiho (fox shapeshifter) from a planet which is incompletely terraformed and therefore poor. At one point someone sabotages a spaceship by throwing things around to fuck up the feng shui. Yoon Ha Lee is writing for a middle-grade audience, which means that he has been forced to tone down his love of spaceship battles and only have a reasonable number.

Minor Mage: A classic Ursula Vernon story; if you like her (or Diana Wynne Jones, whom she’s typically very reminiscent of), I recommend checking it out. Oliver is a mage who has to go on a quest to end the drought, despite only knowing three spells, one of which unties shoelaces. Oliver wins through cleverness rather than through overpowering might. I particularly appreciated the harpist whose magic ability is to turn dead bodies into harps that play themselves and sing about who murdered them. He is so profoundly irritated about this state of affairs! I love it.

Deeplight: Once, giant Lovecraftian beasts– the gods– ruled the seas. A generation ago, all the gods died. Fifteen-year-old Hark, an orphan, grew up on an island with no advantages other than his ability to spin a clever story. Deeplight has Frances Hardinge’s characteristic twisty plot full of betrayal and intrigue, where you’re never quite sure who to trust. If you enjoy themes of body horror, antitheism, and emotional abuse in your children’s literature you will enjoy Deeplight immensely.

Polyamory ITT Announcement

We don’t have quite enough anti-polyamory people for a balanced level of participation. So if you’re anti-polyamory and reading this, please consider participating in the Intellectual Turing Test! If you have anti-polyamory friends, please consider sending them the link and encouraging them to participate!

PSA: WordPress Emails And Anonymity

When you submit a comment on my blog (or any WordPress blog), you have to leave an email. I can see the emails people use.

Some people have left comments as “anon” or “anonymous” or similar, but continued to use the email they post under most of the time. That means I know who left the comment. Obviously, I would never publicly connect an anon’s identity to their main pseudonym; I will hold any information I get this way in confidence. But it’s very legitimate to not trust me, and if you don’t I would suggest using a fake email. (This works fine with WordPress.)