Last month, I wrote an article about celebrities who stopped identifying as asexual (or who never did to begin with).

The Bisexual Problem | verilybitchie (video, 2:06 hours) – The video discusses the narrative logic that prevents bisexual characters from being portrayed on screen.  If a character has a series of relationships, or a love triangle, then it’s only the last relationship that counts as their true love, and a referendum on whether the story takes the side of the straights or the gays.  Already an incredible piece of media analysis, but then it veers into larger topics.  What is sexual orientation anyway?  Why does GLAAD seem to ignore bi characters?  Why do bisexuals have worse outcomes than either gay or straight people?  And what are some serious solutions?

I also strongly recommend the video for ace readers, though it doesn’t directly speak on ace issues.  It’s all relevant by analogy, although I think it may take time to really digest the implications.  There are also many narrative logics that make it difficult to tell “asexual” stories–not to mention “graysexual” stories or others.

The Wrong Kind of American | Julia Curlee | Atlantic (paywalled, but there’s also a free video interview) – I found this story because I know the author (friend of a friend), although she never told us what she was doing for work.  Apparently she worked for the CIA, as part of the Presidential Daily Brief team.  This team compiles information to present to the administration; for example, they would be the ones to tell the president that war with Iran would be a shitshow, not that the president would listen.  Julia’s contributions were essential.  But because she’s trans, the second Trump administration eventually pressured her out anyway, because they do not believe in competence.

Gamergate but actually | NeverKnowsBest (video, 6 hours) – Fair warning, this is a broadly “pro” gamergate take, although from a leftist anti-harassment perspective. The initial spark was a screed by Eron Gjoni, the “jilted ex-lover” of indie game dev Zoe Quinn.  Gjoni made serious accusations of abuse, but this predated #MeToo, so nobody took it seriously on either side.  Pro-gamergate took one line from the screed about Zoe sleeping with a games journalist, and dismissed the rest; anti-gamergate refused to even discuss the accusation’s contents.  In the years since gamergate, Zoe Quinn has left a trail of former allies alleging more abuse and lies.  So… that’s not great.

I knew about the Gjoni angle.  I knew he made a serious and plausible accusation of abuse.  But I never said anything about it because I didn’t know if it was true, and I don’t think anyone wanted to hear it.  I also don’t really think gamergate hinged on one individual.  My biggest problem with gamergate was that they were hostile to the very idea of progressive media criticism, as if media criticism were a breach of journalistic ethics.  It goes to show that their grasp on ethics in game journalism was pretty weak, and the seeds of right-wing reaction was always there.  Anita Sarkeesian was just a video essayist who presented fairly boilerplate lib-fem analysis, she never deserved all that.

Bumble has stopped making women message first – and I know why | The Independent – In most dating apps, men sending lots of messages to lots of women, and women are overwhelmed with low quality impersonal messages from every man.  Bumble tried to flip that by requiring that women always send the first message.  It turns out that women don’t like this, because sending out lots of messages with no response is exhausting.  So Bumble is now dropping its distinguishing feature.

Something the article doesn’t explain, is why the low response rate?  On a typical dating app, response rate is low because women get too many messages.  Were men on Bumble experiencing something similar, or was there something else going on?  Straight people are a mystery.

After Work, We’ll Have Each Other | Asterisk (via) – This article imagines a future without work by looking towards the past.  We’ll have each other, but hell is other people.  The section about 18th century aristocrats was amusing, especially since I’m currently reading Terra Ignota, a series that envisions the 25th century as sprouting from the Enlightenment.

We Are Living Under Mr. Burns | Unlearning Economics (video, 46 min) – A good review of the economic issues of billionaires and mega-corporations.  Modern anti-trust regulations are aimed at reducing the ability of large corporations to use monopoly power to raise prices.  Not only do regulations often fail to achieve this objective, they ignore all the other bad things about monopolies: the concentration of power in the hands of a few unaccountable ultra-wealthy people, and monopsony power in the labor market.

Why are scientists so bad at naming things | Physics for the Birds (video, 33 min) – The video is narrower in scope than the title suggests.  It’s talking about scientific latin as it is used in biological taxonomy.  It goes through history, pronunciation, grammar, and then it talks about the weird ones.

Video Essay Creep | Carlos Maza (video, 16 min) – Carlos observes the trend of creators creating longer and more complex videos over time.  This is not just a video essayist phenomenon, I made a similar observation about bloggers back in 2018.  There is a creative pull towards the bigger and better, but your skill as a creator has a ceiling.  You might be able to make bigger and better things, but only by spending increasing amount of time on it.  So if you go down that path, you write fewer and fewer bigger and bigger things, until eventually you write nothing at all.

But plenty of bloggers are able to combat this.  Bloggers eventually find a steady state.  I advise every blogger to find a steady state.  I’d say the same to youtubers too.  I feel like youtubers who make longer and longer videos are making a creative error, and I’m helpless to do anything about it.

The secret abilities of plants | Pharyngula – The boquila trifoliolata can imitate the leaves of other plants.  Apparently it can even imitate fake plants.  Does the plant have vision??