This month, the Ace Journal Club discussed birth order effects–often cited as evidence of the biological origins of sexual orientation.  I came away thinking the evidence is shakier than I realized.

The Fashion of Sci-Fi Futures | verilybitchie (video, 31 min) – Why does sci-fi use feminine men to signify decadence in the ruling class?  Well, sexism, obviously.  But the video also traces historical and literary precedent, to help us understand the intersection of sexism and fashion.

“Portfolios of the Poor” (book review) | Tell me why the world is weird – How do the global poor live on $2 a day?  It’s perhaps misleading to say they earn $2 a day, because their income tends to be volatile.  There’s a lot of discussion of how they borrow, lend, and save money to smooth out the volatility.

I was thinking about this in relation to my post about loans, and how loans function as a shitty welfare system.  The value of lending is smoothing volatility, and that’s something that poor people need more than anyone else.  But lending and other financial tools have an overhead cost–a cost that falls, unfairly, on the poor.  And when we’re talking about $2 a day, it’s hard to imagine anything resembling the US financial system operating on those margins.

Kanye West and The Daily Wire | Big Joel (video, 43 min) – As an example of how ultra-wealthy people become unmoored from reality, Kanye West openly praises Hitler in song.  In comes Ben Shapiro to say “Hitler is bad actually”, a banal observation turned desperate plea.  Joel explores a fracture in the right wing between anti-semitism and zionism.

How The Roottrees are Dead ditched AI and became a hit | The Verge – A well known example of a game that used AI at first… and then they hired an artist.  People have formed divergent opinions on this, but here’s my take.  I’m a believer in the meme, “I want shorter games with worse graphics and I’m not kidding“.  Cheap AI art makes for bad video game graphics… and that’s good.  It was also good when they replaced it.

Kurt Cobain & Egg Discourse | Rosenkreutz (video, 39 min) – A thoughtful discussion on tendencies within queer and trans discourse towards answers, commitment, certainty.

I appreciated the concept of “boomer moments”/”regressive certainty”–referring to terms and ideas that were once accepted for general use, but have become problematic.  One of the examples is “born this way”, a motto which was adopted for legitimate political reasons, but is not “correct”, and ought to be phased out of use.  (I’ve also written about “born this way”.)  My attitude is that social justice should be iterative.  We take action; we make mistakes; we correct the mistakes.

A dialogue with Jacob Geller | Unwinnable – Jacob Geller talks about the artistry behind video essays.  What makes a good video essay is, primarily, the writing.  But where you can get good at writing by reading a lot of stuff, you don’t necessarily learn how to write by watching video essays.