8nov2023

Continuing with reworkings, today's page features a revamped gift and another long media critique I think I've mostly cleaned up (I know there's at least one typo I'm too lazy to find again...)

I went to visit a sibling so's we could participate in a little athletic event together, and while there took advantage of the household's Disney subscription to watch a bunch of animated flicks in Japanese.

And then for kicks, also watched the live-action version of Beauty and the Beast (in Japanese, though I've also seen it in English:). I've already discussed this movie —twice! but still felt I hadn't really written a definitive review, one reason I took the opportunity to watch it again; plus, this time, I was able to watch the animated and live-action versions back to back and compare them.

I made a long list of both the changes I liked and didn't like, which could probably be summed up with, I liked that there were lots more women secondary characters in the later version, to the point that they achieved parity with the men; I also liked that there were lots more PoC cast; I liked that—just for a change—instead of being a buffoon, Beauty's father is a skilled artisan, and (presumably) gifted painter (though, alas, the props don't support this—you kinda got to use your imagination;)

What I didn't like was that nearly all of their efforts to fix perceived plot holes just opened far larger ones. To wit:

1. Attempting to justify the Beast's curse by making him not only selfish and immature (as in the original Disney version) but a cruel one-percenter who is taxing the ordinary people of the town (fails on several levels, and is perhaps the dumbest change of the lot)
2. Attempting to justify Belle's HEA/attraction to the Beast/make his character more interesting by giving him an aristocrat's education/magic map of the world (I'm sympathetic to this one, but I still think they just should've left this alone)
3. Attempting to justify Belle's mother's death with an overly complicated backstory (yes, Disney princesses always lose their mothers, but Belle's mom having died young goes all the way back to the original)
4. Attempting to justify the fact that the castle servants were also cursed (nobody cares about servants’ rights in any version prior; it's just an unfair fact of life.)
5. Upping the ante of the castle servants dying should the Beast fail to break the curse (this makes the enchantress's curse especially monstrous, which would be fine, except that she's depicted sympathetically, instead of cruel)
6. Increasing the friction between Maurice and Belle and the townspeople; this new wrinkle is particularly sloppily handled, IMNOSHO, to the point of undermining the major theme (who is the the real Beast?) in the animated version
7. attempting to rehabilitate/excuse Gaston's worst excesses with PTSD. Gaston was a great villain precisely because he believably embodied a lot of real, asshole men out there.

Let's start with why the castle servants were complicit in the Beast's bad behaviour: because they stood by while the young child Prince was abused by his father, which “twisted his personality” into that of a monster's. Because of ambiguous wording in the prologue of the original, there was this fan theory that the Enchantress unfairly cursed the Beast because he was only 11 when he acted badly—not yet old enough to be punished so brutally for his cruel behavior. I think this twist was supposed to address this, by making it obvious that the Beast deserved to be cursed.

Nota bene, this only comes up starting with Robin McKinley's version, in which the Beast notes that his family has pissed off a magician, who curses them; until then, the hereto kind and gentle Beast's curse is merely misfortune. By the time Beauty meets Beast in this version, he's had 200 years to clean up his act, but it signals a minor change in the character's arc.

Disney, as Lindsay Ellis notes, actively shifts the dynamic character arc to the Beast from Beauty, and thus the reason he's cursed becomes part of the story: he's a jerk, and the curse is to compel him to improve. However, as his slashing of his own portrait shows (in the animated version), he was clearly an adult by the time he rejected the Enchantress’ entreaties not to be deceived by appearances, and thus, responsible for his own bad behaviour.

But even if the castle servants had been guilty, what, exactly were they supposed to do? The power dynamic between a noble, let alone a prince, and servants makes this a case of the cure being far worse than the disease. (But if they hadn't done this, then it would've been super unfair that the servants die along with the Beast once the rose failed, one of the ways, in which the re-write attempted to up the ante.)

One way an anti-capitalist could genuinely critique the original Disney B&B (or really, any version of the story) is the way all versions of the story side-step the Beast's wealth, basically by making it magical: like so many become-a-princess fairy tales, the underlying structure of being lucky (as well as kind and deserving) is baked in, and doesn't really hold up to the modern idea that everybody equally deserves to be lifted out of a hard life. The writers in the live action B&B (for the first time) attempt to address this by making the Prince not only cruel, but greedy as well, imposing heavy taxes on the nearby town to fund his lavish lifestyle.

It fails, miserably.

Besides the arguments (below) that the economics simply can't function as laid out, the bigger issue is that, in the end, the Beast and his castle —and his wealth—are all restored, but there is no accompanying explanation as how he's to financially support that huge household in his new, kinder, gentler persona, if he got to all that by taxing everyone to the point that he deserved to be made monstrous!

Although when people I think of the plague wiping out swathes of Europe, naturally one assumes mid 1300s, but as it happens France had a second, horrific outbreak in the early 1600s (& doctors were wearing those beaked masks.) That, along with the panniered hoop skirts, and a reference to Shakespeare, suggests the story is set roughly mid-1600s. So far so good! We've successfully moved from a vague, cartoony “sometime long ago” to a specific era in keeping with the presumption of live-action's greater “realism”.

However, using wikipedia numbers as a very rough proxy, France's overall population ranged from 20–28 million from 1600s to late 1700s, and nobility, depending on how you count, was anywhere from 0.5 – 5%, meaning everyone else was the tax base. The Beast is a Prince, which puts him at the 0.5 end, but to make the math easy, let's use 1%. One percent of (again, to make the math easy) 25 million people is 250,000 which is between a third and half the size of the biggest city, Paris, at 650,000 people, and way too many to be a “little town.”

This is a problem because we're told in the prologue that part of the reason the Prince was cursed to be a beast was his greed, his selfishness in taxing the “little town” to fund his lavish lifestyle; but even 10,000 people isn't a big enough tax base (by at least a factor of 10) yet it's still too big (by roughly a factor of 10) to be the close-knit everybody-knows-everybody-else community shown in the film (i.e. no more than 200 people).

If all that indirect-by-math evidence doesn't do it, then consider the occupation of Belle's father, Maurice, who instead of being depicted as a crackpot inventor of useless objects (albeit a lovable one) is now portrayed as a skilled artisan of gorgeous, intricate clockworks...that no-one in town can evidently afford to purchase, since Maurice has to travel in order to market his creations.

That there are not even any rich merchants interested in showing off their bourgeois status doesn't say much for the town's financial resources, let alone its ability to support a prince with a castle full of these sorts of knicknacks—not to mention the clothes, the food, the dozens or hundreds of hangers on who also needed to be supported somehow or other.

I had some other issues with the town, most notably the much more antagonistic attitude towards Belle: in the original she's odd, but she and her eccentric father are accepted as part of the community, albeit on its fringes; in the newer version, she's punished for teaching a little girl to read by having her newly washed laundry dumped into the streets.

The writing in this scene is just plain poorly thought out.

The goal, one assumes, is to sub in a suitably “realistic” invention for the ridiculous steam-powered wood chopper in the original—kudos, they picked one that addresses one of pre-Industrial women's most back-breaking chores, laundry. So far so good—Belle is using a labor-saving device that gives her more time to do important things (like read.)

Buuuuuuut, this giant, donkey driven barrel full of suds rolling around in the fountain bugged in me a bunch of ways: a) it would prevent access by anyone else doing their washing the traditional way because it continuously circles around the entire perimeter of the fountain; b) and wouldn't all that soap pollute the town's primary source of water? The townspeople could perhaps be forgiven for fouling their water from ignorance (though really, just because people are provincial doesn't mean they're stupid, especially about resources held in common, whereas outsiders coming in with some ‘easier’ ‘better’ approach is a pretty frequent problem, and as depicted...that's exactly what's Belle is doing, here.) c) If the soap in the fountain isn't a problem (or even if it is, but I guess not?) why isn't Belle sharing this labor saving device?

Sure, the towns-women could reject it—because they're suspicious of change, because the town priest thought it was evil, whatever—but as the scene's written now, what we're supposed to feel and believe—Belle is rejected because she's clever and feminist (as shown by the reading incident)—is belied by the alternate explanation that Belle is causing difficulties for other women by hogging a common resource.

No wonder the townspeople were ripe for resentment!

The sad thing is that, unlike the bugbear of the Beast's wealth, this scene could've been made to work with a bit more attention to detail. Frustrating.

By making the townspeople more mean-spirited, their culpability in participating in Gaston's witch monster hunt is flatter—of course they're gonna reject Maurice's appeals and slaughter the Beast, they're ignorant country hicks who won't allow girls to read and pick on someone different than them as a matter of course. —Whereas in the original it's clear that the townsfolk are ordinary people: loving parents, husbands and wives, whipped up by fear into behaving badly, like humans through the ages who have failed to do the right thing when seduced by mob mentality (& one of the changes to the original story that really works well with the whole ‘who is actually the beast’ theme.)

Which leads to yet another problem: recall that the servants in the castle have been enchanted for their supposed complicity in the Beast's abuse; well, a lot of them are married or otherwise in relationships with the townspeople, who are made by the enchantress to “forget” that the Beast and his castle are right next door. This opens up a great big can of worms: At least two of the characters (the inn/bar keep and the mean woman(?) are, respectively, married to Mrs Potts and Cogsworth. The former has not only lost his spouse, but his child through no fault (I could see of his own): he's not even got a memory of them!

What, I wondered, was to keep these folks from forming new relationships? Or, come to think, suffering trauma from big chunks of their lives missing, or even from suppressed memories? As with the obliviate spell in Harry Potter, there are some thorny ethical issues completely elided here.

(I mean, in the original, the Beast and his castle have been lost to the sands of time, but how to get the townspeople to forget something that only happened a few years ago: otherwise, Belle's father would've known to avoid the castle—the story would completely lose its fairy-tale mysterious origin; yet if they did freeze time in the castle, how heartbreaking for townspeople? if they froze both the town and the castle—not real practical! —then how would have newcomers Belle and Maurice gotten in? But if Belle and Maurice always lived there, then how would he have acquired his Parisian skills?

Never mind that in the original story, Maurice is a fabulously successful merchant who loses his fortune, and his older daughters resent this deeply [to the point of becoming de-facto evil stepsisters thereby], whereas kind and sweet Belle adapts to the new hard life in the country, and attempts to take care of her father—e.g. volunteering to return to the Beast in her father's stead. This is barely alluded to in the live action version by Belle saying she's ‘just a country girl’, hinting, very distantly, to her father's escape from his plague ridden life in Paris. Though even there he was still pretty poor! —They lived inside a windmill, for some reason I never really understood, but having been in real period windmills, they're not exactly spacious abodes.)

In the animated version, crackpot though he may be, clearly Maurice (as evidenced by his Albert-Einstein character design) really is a genius, and clearly Belle has absorbed her love of reading and desire for exploration from him; in the new, they're refugees from a plague ridden Paris, where Maurice would have had the opportunity to learn fancy gold-smithing skills such clock-making and the new Italian style realistic painting of the (ahem) Baroque era, as well as a cultured attitude in general that simply isn't really available to a (relatively) poor man otherwise.

The plague does conveniently serve to explain why Belle's mother is dead, why her father is adamant about shielding her from the metropolis (and cities were indeed deadly fonts of disease), which Belle, having an adventurous spirit, wishes to explore.

But it still has a bolted-on feel to the storyline.

(I really like the bookseller character in the new version, but I can't help remembering the words of a woman talking about a little bookstore that opened in the small town where I first attended college, which was, that it wouldn't survive, because if a bookstore could've, she would be running it: even with the liberal arts school, there simply wasn't a big enough customer base. I don't recall what excuse was made for the bookseller in the live-action B&B surviving, but it wasn't convincing.)

Also significantly weakened is Gaston's character. In the original he's a narcissist, a bully...and basically the little town's de facto leader, admired for his handsome figure and his hunting prowess. Given that he doesn't seem to have an occupation (besides killing things and harassing Belle)—not to mention that he wears clothing with more trim such as metal buckled belts and gloves, and has a shirt and coat both dyed in an expensive colour (i.e., blood red, as opposed to the mostly, and typical, browns of most other townsfolk, and yes, I understand the symbolism, but that just means it works on multiple levels) suggests that he's amongst the wealthiest.

To put it bluntly, he's your average misogynistic, entitled asshole, shielded by status.

His sidekick, Le Feu (literally, “the Fool”) is an even more stereotyped character—short, fat, fawning, plain, and not very bright. His job in the original Dizzy version is by association to point up how venial and socially impoverished Gaston is. In the new version, they try to humanize Gaston, a bit, by implying that he's suffering from some sort of war-based trauma that's wrecked his self-control and is, on some level, the excuse for his excessive hunting—animals, the Beast...Belle.

It doesn't work. PTSD is not an excuse to sexually assault people, let alone attempt to murder them.

But in their decision to explore the homoerotic subtext suggested by Le Fou's one-sided friendship with Gaston in the animated original, the new version had a lot of levelling up to do, and in the process, made Le Fou —perhaps—one of the most interesting (& sympathetic) characters in the new version. He's still deeply insecure, but no longer buffoonish, and clearly more clever than Gaston; why does he hang around, besides for the opportunity to admire Gaston's admittedly handsome figure?

Well, being a closeted gay man makes a lot of his motivations clearer, and moreover, befriending Gaston provides cover for a townspeople that—when you think about it logically—is not very kind to weirdos and marginalized groups: they're nasty to Belle for being intellectual and teaching girls to read, and shun the beggar woman Agathe (who is actually the enchantress in disguise.) No wonder Le Fou has attached himself to a strong and influential personage, despite clearly being smarter & having (much) greater empathy than Gaston, whom he attempts to coach through the latter's temper tantrums, er trauma with meditation techniques.

So I liked that. (I also liked that they changed the original, and rather transphobic/sexist scene in which a man, attacking the castle, is defeated by Wardrobe by enclosing him & changing his garb to a woman's —he's horrified and runs away. In the newer version, three men get trapped, and two, appalled, run away; the third, clearly pleased with his new clothing, struts off, shortly to encounter Le Fou in the ending ballroom scene.)

By then Le Fou realizes it's not worth his soul to be complicit in Gaston's evil schemes and thus arguably he has the most dynamic character arc in the entire story. But, wait, you say, what about the Beast?

Wellllllll....he gets a bit more backstory for his angst, too: in addition to the magic mirror that can show people far away (a traditional component of the story) he also has a magic map, and a university level education, which gives him the opportunity to exchange Shakespeare quotes with Belle, and (unlike the original Disney version) be enough of an intellectual to be interesting for her. (In the very oldest versions of the story, Beauty has any number of idle pastimes available to her—not just a library, but magical musical performances and plays, a sort world-wide webcam that lets her observe people far away, etc; it's in McKinley that she she becomes a dedicated scholar, fluent in Latin and Greek, as well as an avid horsewoman, attenuated in the Disney version as a love of fairy-tales in books; her noble charger becomes the rather goofy draft horse Phillipe).

But Beast's courtly sophistication, even in-story, causes him to mock Belle's provincial naivety, which to my mind undermines the presumed success of their long term relationship far more than the lack of common intellectual interests do in the animated version. A magic map doesn't actually make up for ‘exploring the whole wide world’ but instead implies they might not be able to, or that Belle's childhood dreams will be sacrificed as a Princess.

And then there's Agathe.

The Enchantress is unnamed in all other versions (that I recall) because she's basically a force of nature, a macguffin to get the story rolling. In this version she hangs around town as a beggar woman, presumably to keep tabs on the folks she's cursed. The only hint I got for this reasoning (that I could see) was that she rescues Maurice from Gaston (&, to his shame, Le Feu, who isn't quite brave enough to circle back and rescue Maurice) who have tied up Belle's luckless father and left him to freeze or be eaten by wolves.

I don't get her motivations at all: cursing the selfish Beast—fine. Cursing the hapless castle servants, possibly to die, absolutely not fine. Cursing the townspeople to forget their friends and family working at the castle, hideous. If they'd portrayed her as a villain, or at least some sort of amoral, uncaring chaos neutral, that would've worked (though it would have detracted from the antagonism between Beast and Gaston, which is already unduly weakened in this version).

If she'd simply cursed the Beast and flounced off, leaving him (as part of his personal growth) to become angry, not on his own account (as he would've been originally), but on his servants’, now that would've been a nice precursor to the Beast sacrificing his hopes for Belle's needs. (And—and—it would've taken the whole appearances are deceptive to another level: recall in this version the Beast rejects the sorceress’ gift of a rose because she's old and ugly, and promptly backtracks when she reveals her beautiful form. Now, just for a bit of subversion, add in the realization that she was cruel all along, for while the Beast may have deserved to be cursed, his servants did not. And that realization might start him along the path of...so, how about that feudalism and deeply unfair distribution of wealth...?)

But overall, Agathe hangs around her victims and does nothing. Why? The only obvious answer is that she's enjoying the misery her handiwork has inflicted upon these people, which contrasts pretty sharply with her character as a kind, or at least just, enchantress.

And, finally (my goodness, this is so long) I admit to mourning a few bits in the animated that just couldn't work in the new version...

1. Chip's child's-view take in a movie for kids was mostly lost, but particularly the scene in which he uses the wood-chopper to rescue adults was charming and fun—and that humor was pretty much cut;
2. Lumiere was a somewhat problematic flirt in the original, but his playfulness was nicely balanced with Cogsworth's stuffiness; I liked his relationship with Plumette in the new version much better, but poor Cogsworth got downgraded to a bitter scold—the line in which he wishes to be a clock again when he spots his (admittedly dreadful) wife was awful. Give me my ‘if it ain't baroque’ and especially my very favourite response, when the Beast asks about appropriate gifts for Belle, Cogsworth's delightfully dry and snarky, ‘flowers...chocolates...promises you don't intend to keep’ back!
3. And I kinda liked the idea of Belle's father, Maurice, and Mrs. Potts, getting together, which is gently implied in the original animated version.

I will say, in compensation, I really enjoyed the Beast's rejoinder to Belle's acknowledgement of his saving her life (arguably the beginning of their relationship & certainly an important part of the story in both Disney versions): ‘well, I never thanked you for not leaving me to be eaten by wolves.’ (Here, his sarcasm works well; it's a charming—and in the later version, funny as well—scene.)

So, while I feel the original Disney version is superior, I think the live-action has its charms as well. This is because in my world, one can never have too many versions of this story:) And speaking of versions, here's a revamped gift decoration.

7nov2023

Now that Inktober's over, I'm slotting in some stuff that's been piling up—today's piece, frex, has been done for awhile, merely waiting on me to photograph it (& make the accompanying page), which, since the owner was visiting last night, I finally got up off my ass and did. Yay for (ending) procrastination, I guess?

To go along this theme of tidying up (& yesterday's Japanese theme;) here are some Japanese themed linkies:

• (eastern and western culture rewires the brain)
• anime for each of Japan's 47 prefectures via BB
• the illegal ramen vendors of Tokyo
• a video of flutist advertising his mobile ramen stand
• 3 D realtime map of Tokyo's subway system, with livecams

This necklace is itself a form of tidying up, since it's a restring. Enjoy.

6nov2023

So I was re-watching My Happy Marriage, (currently on Netflix) which is basically Cinderella with a touch of Beauty & the Beast thrown in. (Or, if you want to get specific, it's King Cophetua and the Beggar-maid, but that's not a story with which most folks are now familiar;) Set during Japan's Taisho period, a man is forced by his family to marry in hopes that his bride will pass along a hoped-for talent to their children; when their daughter doesn't, and Mom dies young, the man, (now presumably head of family & in charge of his destiny) marries the woman he's fancied all along, and the daughter of that union does in fact manifest talent.

So the older cinderella daughter, Miyo, is relegated to servant status, abused especially by her step mother and step sister, until she reaches marriageable age, at which point she's callously passed off to a man whom her family believes will throw her out, or worse. If this sort of thing is your jam, you'll probably enjoy the series (if it isn't, Miyo's extreme, but understandable, passivity will likely drive you nuts) but that's not the bit I want to focus on.

No, I have a textile nit.

One of the eps features kumihimo, and this blog's devoted 3 readers know I'm always very happy to see kumi in fiction, my favourite example, of course, being the splendid Your Name; but as it's a core part of that story, the animators were careful to get it right. Far more typical is that, along with the pleasure in seeing a favourite craft is frustration at the inaccuracies at seeing it depicted incorrectly.

So it was in episode 4, “The Gift”, in My Happy Marriage. Why? Because the heroine uses a (handheld) braiding disk to make her cord, aaaaaaaaaaannnnnd

there were no braiding disks during the Taisho period!

If you want the reasoning behind this assertion, I've put a detailed explanation on another page, but the short answer is that foam braiding disks (or plates, as they're sometimes called) weren't invented until nearly a century after the story is set.

In a sense, this is a real accolade for the disk's inventor, Makiko Tada, who envisioned it as a device to make kumihimo accessible to everyone as opposed to an ancient craft slowly dying out: it's become so successful that it's ubiquitous, and people (including the writers of the manga and anime of My Happy/Blissful Marriage) have no idea how recent its invention is, and thus, how anachronistic it is to depict one in a story set in 1912–1926.

This is another of those, ‘But who cares about an obscure $discipline or its history?’ (Especially in this case, when equivalent story beats could've been achieved in a historically correct way.) I mean, I could've obsessed over how the series promotes the shufu culture of “good wives and wise mothers”, which originated in the Meiji era and is basically the Japanese equivalent of the Victorian ideal of “separate spheres” in which the woman keeps a clean, beautiful serene home, an oasis for the stronger man coming home after the hurly-burly of public, let alone political, life, for which women were thought too delicate.

I could've angsted over the differences between the protagonists: the male lead is nearly a decade older, a powerful practitioner of his discipline, and very wealthy; whereas the female lead is only 19, has almost no training in anything besides cooking and cleaning, and possesses only the rags on her back and a broken comb.

But I don't.

The Taisho period was a time of great change in Japan, in which the upper echelons (to which all the important male characters in this story belong) were, on the one hand, adopting western dress and customs (such as owning and driving automobiles) while on the other promoting a militaristic and colonialist goals of that era, again in line with competing with western powers who looked down on their Asian neighbor. As in the west, upper class women's power actually become more constrained during this time, as they were expected to stay home and out of the public sphere. (Just walking in public, especially unaccompanied by a husband or other man, was a big deal in the late 1800s—as opposed to, say, the Middle Ages (or WWII) when women had to take over because the men were away.)

He has a life outside of their relationship. She doesn't.

I s'pose it gets a pass because the male protagonist is hugely appealing: he asks his fiancee to be honest with him, encourages her to practise social skills and set intimidating though not unreasonable goals; he also not only treats his sister with respect, even though she's divorced, but considers her a knowledgeable resource. Like Darcy in Pride & Prejudice (another personal fave, why do you ask?) he doesn't tolerate anyone mistreating his elderly housekeeper, and she in turn deeply esteems him. In other words, he sees women as people—a feminist.

It also doesn't hurt that the female protagonist is slowly gaining self-confidence and courage.

But, he's a member of a) the aristocracy and b) the military. At least in early episodes his household encourages Miyo exclusively in her shufu duties: cooking, cleaning, makeup, wearing kimono. (They're not married so she's not yet expected to pop out babies, but being a mom is pretty much baked into Japanese expectations for female protags. Unless, say, they're cyborgs, a la Ghost in the Shell.) Braiding kumi, to my eyes at least, was the most creative use of her time that Miyo has had, though by episode 7, it's implied she hopes to learn cha-do (tea ceremony) and ikebana (flower arranging) as well as the more western style skills of ballroom dancing and entertaining. She also is skilled enough in sho-do —calligraphy—to write her name in kanji, but I'd say that—as in most anime (& manga) featuring idealized feminine portrayals, her real love is preparing food. —This is undoubtedly an art, just not one that especially excites me;)

We won't even get into the class issues, hmmm?

So I suppose I let the patriarchal, military-focused society in My Happy Marriage slide by for the same reason I do in the Vorkosiverse: it's background for what is essentially a love story that centers the growing kindness and respect two people are developing for each other.

So, having hand-waved that away (however ineffectually), why the angst?

Part of it, I suppose, is the love of one's passions. While realizing that no-one has the ability to live all parts of their lives at a hundred percent (let alone the 110% which those stupid capitalist-inspired “philosophies” try to extract the maximum from their beleaguered peons) and as such, recognizing that time-pressured manga-ka and animators simply haven't the resources to spend hours researching a brief depiction of a craft that, even today, most people can't—or would see the need—to do, still I do believe that everyone should have one (or a few) passions for which they do care.

In the context of kumi, it doesn't really matter all that much. Anyone interested in it can easily learn how it actually works, disk, marudai or even loop manipulated. But for some other things...it does matter. While I was struggling with this page, I read another, by my favourite computer security blogger. He's retired now, busily making things like...Japanese inspired knives. But it's clear, when he writes about his experiences, that he's in the same rarefied echelons as Bruce Schneier, who, if he isn't the very best computer security expert out there, certainly is the most famous. (Kumi's equivalent, btw, would be that self-same Makiko Tada whom I cited above;)

This guy wrote a long (& far more entertaining) post about his frustrations with reporters who refused to nail down conspiracy theorists’ slapdash and indefensible “JAQing” off about voting machines and the lies about stealing the 2020 election. Their claims were so self-evidently stupid, inconsistent and simply the-moon-is-made-of-green-cheese levels of unbelievable, whyyyyyyyy could not even the most junior journalist not take those ridiculous theories apart?

He then went onto explain all the obvious questions said journalists could've and should've asked, yet failed to do so. —I'm an artist, and what knowledge I have of computer security therefore comes from living with someone who worried about this sort of thing, both professionally and personally (as it affects our home network); some of the stuff was truly easy to understand, other bits not so much. (Certainly all of it was far more self-evidently obvious than why a Japanese braider could not possibly have used a wooden kumihimo disk a hundred years ago, nor even, in fact, why such an object [as depicted] can't even function.)

But it was one of the commenters (#6, JM) that finally brought all the strands of why this topic has obsessed me (well, besides autistic tendencies, ofc): forget all those details: just ask for hard evidence. Over and over, if someone's making wild claims, then they need to show evidence for them. Detailed evidence. Not, voting machines are rigged, but ‘how do you know they were tampered with, exactly?’ Then it's up to the liars, who won't, in fact, be able to show that the paper audits mismatch the electronic votes, or that there are unauthorized thumb-drive accesses in the kernel logs, or whatever.

(This allowed me, finally to distill my rebuttal to one sentence. With all the technical stuff elsewhere.) Meanwhile, I could wish this bit had been accurate, because the manga truly is beautifully drawn—I love all the sprays of flowers and Mucha-esque borders—and dream of a crowd-sourced day when, in fact, that such things could be fixed—while acknowledging the world is imperfect, yet worth the effort to make it ever more so.

Aaaaand, finally, here's the very imperfect disk braid that—at least in terms of length and possibly thickness and colour—might've been appropriate for Kudō Kiyoka's hair tie:)

1nov2023

Happy All Soul's Day. For those of you into it, trusting you also had an enjoyable Halloween—now that the f2’s are grown up and I don't have kids to take ’round for candy collection, I don't do much aside from enjoying other folks’ decorations, especially the ones that photograph well, and those I surely do appreciate:)

As it's been a good week since I last posted, the links have once again been piling up.

• Black cyclist retraces this very cool historical route: I Chased the Ghosts of the Army's Forgotten Black Bicycle Troop. The illustrations are great too:)
• Another small victory: folks preserving India's heritage cultivars of mangoes
• Free, Open Source Map
• Bookstores, especially independent ones, are awesome. These get my thanks for their patriotic service defending freedom of speech.
• Cowboys and the ‘Wild West’ is deeply embedded into US mythology; but historian Steven Conn makes the case that the rural farm, as depicted in the classic American Gothic, is equally mythology as argued in this long-form New Yorker magazine article.
• This long-form article on local, artisan flours is interesting, but I wish the whole grain folks would be a little more honest about just how difficult it is to transition from white to whole-wheat flours—I've had access to local white whole wheat flour for years through my co-op, which is bred to look and behave more closely to traditional white flour, and I've learned to incorporate it successfully into some things, especially strongly flavoured quick-risen muffins; but it's just hard for me to do traditional baking with whole wheat flours and get the resulting bread to rise properly or taste right. (To be fair, it's difficult to get the results I want even with King Arthur white flour, so poor technique is absolutely a factor.)
• Finally—ending as I started, with history, swarm charms for directing bees have fallen out of favour as our scientific understanding of bees has improved, but they're a (heh) charming piece of history.

And here's three doodles to round out the end of my efforts towards 2023 Inktober.

20oct2023

Happy friday, folks.

Honestly, today's links start out dismaying. This stuff makes me what I used to call crazy, but I guess that catch-all term for anxious/depressed/despairing for humanity is out of vogue now. It's not that I like putting myself through stress over events for which I have little influence and no control, but I feel compelled to keep abreast of them, at least a little...perhaps to avoid being deceived, as this former Trump supporter decided he was after delving into materials to he initially read to support his beliefs, but led to undermining them completely:

• (Via bb) a tiktokker explains why his views shifted away from Trump. This little essay is only about 5 minutes long, but if that's too much, well, the teal deer is ...he read Michelle Alexander's (splendid)^[1] The New Jim Crow, i.e. how the prison industrial complex extracts felons’ labour for pennies on the dollar (seriously, prisoners are sometimes paid less than a dollar an hour. In the US.) and how this was so deeply unjust was really driven home when...well, watch the video. It's gonna be far more persuasive than some middle aged white lady on the internet.
• Journalist Vincent Bevins has a new book out, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, and talks about why the many 2010s revolutions failed in an interview with Mother Jones. It was so deeply depressing I can't claim to have done much more than skim (the interview, let alone read the book!) but the teal deer seems to be that the uprisings for which we had so much hope a decade ago in the 2010s basically all got co-opted by authoritarian power-seekers, who stepped into the horizontal, anarchic power vacuums to take over and subvert the original, democratic aims of the initial protestors.
• While depressing, it should hardly be surprising—this MIT article ends on a somewhat hopeful note for rescuing the internet, but starts out reviewing its similarly open (source), rather anarchic history (once it escaped beyond darpanet, of course...); which, as we all now know has been colonized by large, profit seeking companies (not to mention professional trolls) primarily interested in money, not the betterment early optimists hoped for.
• Marcus Ranum, an amateur historian on Freethoughtblogs, attempted to clarify his (and our) thought processes concerning the horror that is the Israel-gov't/Hamas conflict using International Humanitarian Law...and failed as he admits in the comments. Perhaps the most telling observation is that this situation is a foreshadowing:

This year of conflict is a dry run for how the international system is going to cope with the mass migrations, crop failures, fires and floods brought by climate change. In case you haven’t been watching, the prognosis is not good. Humanity is going to need to work together, but instead we have, well, a massive chunk of the taxes I pay going to the US war machine and not so much toward social services. War, after all, is a continuation of national privilege by other means.

What acted as my ‘but does this guy know what he's talking about’ cross-check was a couple of book recces at the end, particularly Bloodlands, which I've seen praised multiple times:

To those who are interested in the conflict in the Levant, I recommend Tim Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe between Stalin and Hitler which goes into a gruesome amount of the history of how power politics and racism turned Europe into a wasteland for Jews, which led to mass migration. And, Collins and LaPierre’s O Jerusalem which is an eye-opening account of zionism and the founding of Israel. Neither book is fun reading but both are fascinating.

On a somewhat more upbeat note:

• The gorgeous sculptural legacy the Piccirilli Brothers left us in NYC
• Continuing with art, there's a graphic novel adaptation of Watership Down that looks pretty good! I'm hopeful, anyway—this story has already been a splendid novel, and the original animated film is equally good—a rarity in my experience.
• On the science side, this Wired article discusses work proposing a mechanism for preferential chirality (right and left handedness, or mirror image-ness) of chemicals in the formation of life. Basically, the earth's magnetic field and the spin of electrons (which comes in two forms) interacted to cause it. The theory is still being tested, but provides a geologic reason (the earth's field) that's a pretty cool explanation.
• Google is using AI to program traffic lights better. Another wired article, in which I assumed Google was using its massive map-based databases to adjust traffic signals in realtime. (I mean, I thought this was a thing in some rich cities, but evidently it's still sf.) As it happens most lights can't be adjusted this way; they're adding or subtracting a second here or there, or in really complicated cases, co-ordinating two consecutive lights—sometimes, by sending a traffic engineer to manually adjust the light's timing. As a pedestrian I noted that their advice can fail in some circumstances because it doesn't adequately compensate for the needs of public transportation or pedestrians. But hey, it's a start.
• Albatrosses may rely on ultra-low frequencies of waves to determine the best flight paths—heh. I too am attempting to read waves, albeit with my eyes, and couldn't help fantasizing how this perception might help sailors navigates potentially dangerous seas....

So, that's this week's collection. Or you can have a little doodle.

13oct2023

Heh, here we are, barely halfway through October, and I'm already losing steam, even at my half-assed level of effort, for Inktober. However, I wanted an excuse to post a link about the annular solar eclipse happening tomorrow—which I won't see, we're having clouds and heavy autumnal rains all day, as is typical in this region—cuz eclipses are cool.

Soooooo, since one of the inktober prompts is angel, and this has an angel, with ink, and the prompt list is published early I guess this means I'm just really ahead of the curve, here.