December tends to be a slow blogging month for me, and apparently that also extends to how many links I end up collecting.  So, just a few things this time.

I recently published an article on The Asexual Agenda analyzing an episode of the kids’ show Recess.

What Elden Ring Is Like For Someone Who Doesn’t Play Games | Razbuten (video, 28 min) – Another perspective on a topic I wrote about, in my dialectic review of Elden Ring.  My husband is definitely a more “advanced” gamer than Razbuten’s wife, and did eventually complete Elden Ring, but he agreed with many of the observations in this video.  He said he went back to look at the tutorial, and it was remarkable how many things he misunderstood or completely missed.  He also tried avoiding difficult encounters by going elsewhere in the open world, but then it turns out that everything else in the game is also too difficult.

For another perspective, I also saw another article titled “‘Elden Ring’ is undeniably game of the year–and that’s a problem“.  While I agree with the main point, I find some of the supporting arguments bizarre.  What kind of person wants to get into gaming for the first time, and goes straight to Elden Ring just because it got game of the year?  How is it that they have heard of The Game Awards at all, without having heard that Elden Ring is hard?  I’m what they call a “core” gamer and even I am barely aware of The Game Awards.

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If Professional Investors Missed this | Jeff Kaufman – Background: Last month, the cryptocurrency exchange FTX collapsed, because its founder Sam Bankman-Fried had apparently been dipping into customer funds.  Bankman-Fried had a lot of ties to the EA movement so I was curious what EA folks were saying about it.  EA is not happy about it, and in fact they are directly impacted, with many promised charity grants now gone.  There’s a question of whether EA ought to have seen the red flags, and the answer is maybe yes, maybe no.

From an external perspective, it looks like EA is being pretty naive about allowing billionaires to use their movement to launder their own reputations.  And Bankman-Fried should have been suspicious from the start, as a cryptogrifter who places a lot of focus on AI risk.  Perhaps it was impossible to foresee quite how far Bankman-Fried’s nefariousness extended, but it feels like this was a “reap what you sow” situation.

Penises, Privilege, and Feminist & LGBTQ+ Purity Politics | Julia Serano – Serano outlines a theory of how sex is seen as a contamination event, and describes its impact on bisexual and trans people.  I also appreciated the explanation of “cultural feminism”.

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I’ve been busy the past month!  The Ace Community Survey released its annual survey, and a 140 page report on an earlier survey.  I also wrote a long blog post about the intersection of asexuality and being a nerd, in which I complain about a certain fictional asexual physicist on a show I have never watched.

Google’s Caste-Bias Problem | The New Yorker – An interview with a former Google employee, who tried to organize a DEI event about caste discrimination.  Google got complaints from other employees about the event, and it got “postponed”, which seems to really mean it was cancelled.  Instead, the organizer of the event was given a warning, and then she resigned.  Apparently it’s a common stance among conservative (?) Hindus that caste discrimination just doesn’t exist and that to even speak of caste discrimination is anti-Hindu discrimination.  As a social justice activist, I learn to be humble about axes of marginalization that I am unfamiliar with–but I’m confidently unsympathetic with that point of view.  For members of a majority group to deny that the minority group experiences discrimination, that’s an all too common pattern, and presumably cross-cultural.

Why Queer TV is Getting Worse | verilybitchie (video, 45 min) – Verity Ritchie talks about “gaystreaming”, content that is gay but otherwise does everything it can to appeal to mainstream tastes.  There’s discussion of Heartstopper, contrasted with the work of Desiree Akhivan, topped with a discussion of the economics of streaming services like Netflix.  I love it.

As I pointed out in my review of Heartstopper, its gentle low-stakes story is common in the queer webcomic genre it comes from–but I don’t think that’s what makes it particularly amenable to being mainstreamed.  What makes it mainstreamable is that its author is clearly passionate about educating people about queer issues: modeling good behavior, denying stereotypes, and explaining relevant issues.  This is valuable to straight people who clearly need that education, and also for queer people, for whom learning about being queer is an important part of personal development.  But it also confines the webcomic to issues that are simple enough to be widely teachable, and the story may not reflect the messy realities of queer lives.  Following ace admiral I call this “checklist representation“, which is primarily concerned with checking off all the things required for a “good” representation.

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FYI, I was interviewed about romantic attraction and other things, for Honi Soit, a newspaper for the University of Sydney.  I like the article a lot, although I hope it’s not too dense, haha.

Summer of Math Exposition 2 | 3Blue1Brown (video and article series) – SoME2 is a contest to produce math explanation articles and videos.  I am all over this–although I’m also judgmental so I will say that the quality can be mixed.  The winners are a good place to start.

I’ve written quite a number of math explanations in the past myself, and this makes me want to write more.  Gosh it sure takes a lot of work though.  Maybe I could revamp my really old explanations, like the one about the Banach-Tarski paradox, or the ant & rubber band problem (the rubber band is the universe).

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In case anyone is interested, this month I wrote “How to tell if you’re allosexual, if you’re a journalist“, about low quality articles that seem intended to exploit SEO.

that female athlete doesn’t look feminine enough | Pervert Justice – Gatekeeping trans women from sports ultimately results in gatekeeping cis women as well.  I think this pragmatic argument isn’t the most satisfying, because it doesn’t make a positive case for the inclusion of trans women–but it is, after all, still correct.

Fixing My Brain with Automated Therapy | Jacob Geller (video, 53 min) – Jacob tried five different therapy apps, and talks about the history of teletherapy.  Plenty of interesting discussion, for instance, about how teletherapy constrains the kind of therapy.  He echoes what I’ve said about Eliza–this technology will be cheap, but bad.  More people could have access to therapy this way, and that’s a good thing… but it’s not good therapy.

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In case anyone’s interested, this month I wrote a whirlwind history of asexual communities.

Facial Expressions Do Not Reveal Emotions | Scientific American – I’m a big fan of psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett and her writing about the construction of emotional categories.  Here she criticizes emotional recognition tools created by data scientists, and I’m inclined to agree.  AI can, at best, identify patterns in facial muscle movement, but the correspondence between facial muscle movement and emotions is culturally mediated, because the emotional categories themselves are culturally constructed.  If you use this AI to make any important decisions that impact people’s lives, there will be unacceptable disparate impact against people of different cultures, or with variant emotional expressions.  Frankly, we should be striving to reduce the impact of emotional expression in job interviews and court decisions.  It’s discriminatory enough when humans are the ones doing it.

Blame It on the Game | Real Life – When I was a teenager, there was a lot of fear of censorship in video games.  The big thing was the Hot Coffee controversy, but there was also a lot of defensiveness of the violence in video games, which gamers would insist was unconnected to violence in the real world.  Games criticism has changed a lot since back then, and gamers are more likely to play up how much games impact the real world.  Gamers today aren’t wrong, but neither were they wrong back then.  The research on violent video games finds “small, reliable effect of exposure to violent video games on aggressive outcomes in laboratory experiments and cross-sectional and longitudinal studies,” but that’s still pretty far from causing shootings.  In this article, Katherine Cross navigates old and new discourses to talk about the real significance of video game violence.

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Brain-O: The Incident | stderr – Marcus Ranum recently had a not-quite-a-stroke, and wrote about his experience.  A scary and fascinating story.  Wish for his full recovery.

Sympathy for Anton Ego: An Antifan Manifesto | osteophage – Coyote aims to persuade readers of the positive possibilities of negative fandoms.  Of course, I didn’t need to be persuaded, I was already on board.  I’m of the belief that the best way to enhance appreciation of a thing is to read (or write) a scathing criticism of one or more of its aspects.  It’s true that antifandoms and hatedoms have a poor reputation, and well-deserved in many specific examples.  But it doesn’t have to be that way.

Making Sense of VRChat, the “Metaverse” People Actually Like | People Make Games (video, 38 min) – Some good journalism exploring VRChat, a space where people can inhabit avatars in a virtual space.  They interview lots of people to understand how they use it, talk about why everyone’s an anime girl, and the threat (and potential) of corporate colonization of virtual space.

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