September Link Roundup
Sep. 29th, 2021 05:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aprilmarchThe roundup is likely to be shorter again this month, and not for a reason I'm proud of: I neglected to save articles I liked in a timely manner, and forgot them 😳
Here are the articles I read this month and remembered.
Brazilian TRPG designer calls attention to the relative invisibility of games from the Global South
Because I am a weird, I found about these tweets from a compatriot of mine through a Malay game desinger on Twitter. But the sentiment is very powerful. Kickstarter allows project creators from a mere 25 countries, and if you're not in one of them, you lose a major (potential) source of revenue. This is, of course, without mentioning the extra work you need to translate your work into English (then redo the layout, which is double the work). Unless, of course, you decide to work only in English - foregoing your own home audience. There are no easy solutions, other than more crowdfunding services springing up with similar reach to Kickstarter.
Horsehistory stufy and the discovery of new areas of thought
As someone who is just interested enough in lingustics to have given up actually studying it, I loved this concept: coming up with new fields of thought by having computers randomly create new words, then trying to figure out what they mean. The piece's example of 'horsehistory', defined as the study of umconfortable history, conjures a briliant future for this idea. Sadly, I don't think this will hold. It's more likely for words to stick to concepts we do have but lack words for than for the opposite to happen; the modern history is full of perfect terms for things that were invented by visionaries about ten years before they would become useful, only to be forgotten and replaced by a blogger's turn of phrase. Or that a concept is hijacked by something close enough that's more needed - look up the history of the term 'emotional labour'. We will not study horsehistory now that we're aware it exists - we'll only look for a name for it when we develop the concept itself. Still, worth reading.
How 9/11 Became Fanfiction Canon
The massive tragedy that was the fall of the WTC towers in 2001 also exposes a peculiar part of the psyche of the US-born: they actually do believe their country is all that exists. It's all fun and games to make fun of the fact that they call their national baseball (?) championship The World Series, but 9/11 shows that they consider this tragedy to be sacrossant, beyond the scope of satire and oblivion. Of course, many people also work through their grief via the medium of fanfiction, so we must ask, what would Sam and Dean from Supernatural think about 9/11?
Into the Zone: Four Days Inside Chernobyl's Secretive 'Stalker' Culture
Speaking of massive tragedies that defined the country they took place in... get out of here, stalker. This piece takes a look at "stalkers", people who offer unlicenced tours of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Why do they do it? It's just for money, isn't it? That seems unlikely - I doubt there's a lot of money in taking people to become sterile and/or get cancer, and they'd likely make a comparable sum by being a guide with the boring, approved tours - guides that apparently have a close enough relationship with 'stalkers' to make dead drops for them. There's more to it than it looks. There's a matter of taking a national tragedy and turning it into national pride.
No music this week. Go play Unsighted instead.
Here are the articles I read this month and remembered.
Brazilian TRPG designer calls attention to the relative invisibility of games from the Global South
Because I am a weird, I found about these tweets from a compatriot of mine through a Malay game desinger on Twitter. But the sentiment is very powerful. Kickstarter allows project creators from a mere 25 countries, and if you're not in one of them, you lose a major (potential) source of revenue. This is, of course, without mentioning the extra work you need to translate your work into English (then redo the layout, which is double the work). Unless, of course, you decide to work only in English - foregoing your own home audience. There are no easy solutions, other than more crowdfunding services springing up with similar reach to Kickstarter.
Horsehistory stufy and the discovery of new areas of thought
As someone who is just interested enough in lingustics to have given up actually studying it, I loved this concept: coming up with new fields of thought by having computers randomly create new words, then trying to figure out what they mean. The piece's example of 'horsehistory', defined as the study of umconfortable history, conjures a briliant future for this idea. Sadly, I don't think this will hold. It's more likely for words to stick to concepts we do have but lack words for than for the opposite to happen; the modern history is full of perfect terms for things that were invented by visionaries about ten years before they would become useful, only to be forgotten and replaced by a blogger's turn of phrase. Or that a concept is hijacked by something close enough that's more needed - look up the history of the term 'emotional labour'. We will not study horsehistory now that we're aware it exists - we'll only look for a name for it when we develop the concept itself. Still, worth reading.
How 9/11 Became Fanfiction Canon
The massive tragedy that was the fall of the WTC towers in 2001 also exposes a peculiar part of the psyche of the US-born: they actually do believe their country is all that exists. It's all fun and games to make fun of the fact that they call their national baseball (?) championship The World Series, but 9/11 shows that they consider this tragedy to be sacrossant, beyond the scope of satire and oblivion. Of course, many people also work through their grief via the medium of fanfiction, so we must ask, what would Sam and Dean from Supernatural think about 9/11?
Into the Zone: Four Days Inside Chernobyl's Secretive 'Stalker' Culture
Speaking of massive tragedies that defined the country they took place in... get out of here, stalker. This piece takes a look at "stalkers", people who offer unlicenced tours of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. Why do they do it? It's just for money, isn't it? That seems unlikely - I doubt there's a lot of money in taking people to become sterile and/or get cancer, and they'd likely make a comparable sum by being a guide with the boring, approved tours - guides that apparently have a close enough relationship with 'stalkers' to make dead drops for them. There's more to it than it looks. There's a matter of taking a national tragedy and turning it into national pride.
No music this week. Go play Unsighted instead.
