Link Roundup: June 2025

This month, I wrote an article about the problems with the Asexuality Identification Scale.

Also, a funny thing happened.  These link roundups often include some links to games criticism articles, which I get from Critical Distance.  But the RSS feed had been broken for a few months, and I only just caught up on the backlog.  So I guess several of these articles will be about video games.

As in previous months, I do not have any links relating to the current political trash fire, because I guess I do not feel inspired to comment on those stories.  It’s a trash fire, that’s my comment.

Blunt-Force Ethnic Credibility | Som-Mai Nguyen (via) – This article thoughtfully discusses the low standards of publishers when they strive to represent the perspectives of ethnic minorities.  For example, Penguin contracted with a prominent Vietnamese American writer to translate classic Vietnamese literature, even though he had no translation expertise, and was relying on a translation dictionary.  The author also criticizes the trope of diaspora writers highlighting superficial aspects of their ancestral language as if they were really deep.  In English, this would be analogous to marveling at the mystical connection between “big”, “beg”, “bog”, “bag”, and “bug”.

I could never muster such unwarranted confidence in speaking about my ancestral culture.  Being Chinese does not inherently give me special insight into my ancestral Chinese culture!  This mystical linguistic analysis of Asian languages strikes me as exoticizing, and overly idealizing.  I’ve written a bit about my family history, and it’s impossible for me to idealize it.  I mean, my great grandfather was a tobacco factory owner.

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Reviewing 6 conlang games

A conlang game is a game that asks the player to learn a fictional constructed language. Recently there have been a few well-known examples, namely Heaven’s Vault (2019) and Chants of Sennaar (2023). And so we may speculate about the emergence of a new “genre” of conlang games. Of course, two games does not a genre make. So I am here to tell you that I have played no fewer than six conlang games, and I’m going to briefly review each one.

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Why loans cost money

Boots theory

Boots theory is the idea that being poor is expensive. It comes from a Discworld novel, where a character observes that being poor, he can’t afford a good pair of boots. Instead he buys cheap boots that don’t last nearly as long. The cheap boots cost less money upfront, but are ultimately more expensive since they frequently need replacement.

Taken literally, I’m not sure how accurate the story is. Is it really true that cheap boots are less efficient in durability than expensive boots? It could be, but the cost of boots might also be driven by characteristics besides durability, such as comfort or appearance. Hard to say, since I don’t wear boots.

But if we forget about the boots, then boots theory is obviously true. The boots represent capital. Capital is anything that costs resources now, and provides value later. Capital costs money. If you can’t afford to buy capital, then you ultimately lose out on the value of capital. Being unable to afford capital is therefore expensive.

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FIRE

Sorry if this is obnoxious, but I have some rich people thoughts. I think a lot about retiring early. I figure it’s a ways off, but it seems eventually correct. I’m a tech worker, married to a tech worker, no kids, with fairly frugal interests and habits. I live a very savings-positive lifestyle.

On the internet, this often goes under the heading FIRE (Financial Independence / Retire Early). I’ve read a bit about it, although a lot of it is financial advice, which I haven’t found too helpful. My biggest concerns are not financial.

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How to fold D. Hinklay’s “Stone Board”

Back in 2017, I designed the Cube Tessellation. It’s one that I have shown off here on multiple occasions. I have a crease pattern, step by step instructions, and it appeared in the Geometric Origami Convention in 2024.

Cube Tessellation

Cube Tessellation, designed by me

I recently discovered that a professional origamist, known as D. Hinklay, has been making a model titled “Stone Board” which is identical in design, down to the crease pattern. There are several  several youtube shorts from 2022 and 2023, totaling over 50M views. I also found an instagram post that explicitly claims it’s an original design. At time of writing, his website lists multiple Stone Boards, including one going for $3500.

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Link Roundup: May 2025

This month, the ace journal club covered a qualitative study of autistic sexuality, as it is discussed on autistic forums.  I also wrote an article about why aces often want ace characters to be explicitly labeled as ace.

Effective Altruism: Rationalist Epistemics and the Sequences | Thing of Things – Ozy has a series of essays providing an insider account of EA values.  The thing I find most interesting, is the historical narrative about the Sequences (i.e., the series of essays by Yudkowsky central to capital-R Rationalism).  By Ozy’s account they were primarily based on weird tricks from psychological research.  This became a problem when psychology was so strongly impacted by the replication crisis.  Ozy claims the replication crisis caused a shift towards more community-based epistemological practices.

I was thinking about this when I was writing about fallacy-spotting.  Parts of the Sequences basically constitute a tradition of critical thinking which is parallel to the fallacies.  But where fallacies are grounded in philosophy (?), the Sequences were grounded in scientific research.  Which… makes sense, and is possibly more defensible as a practice.  On the other hand, psychological research is frequently bad, so I guess it was the wrong horse to bet on.

J.K. Rowling (very predictably) Hates Asexual People | The Ace Couple (podcast, 1:13 hours, transcript available) – I follow news on asexuality, and recently the big thing is J.K. Rowling tweeted something anti-ace.  The news articles are all shocked (example, example) that JK also hates adorable harmless aces.  However, veteran activists are not the least bit surprised.  The venn diagram of TERFs and anti-ace folks is basically a circle.  I wouldn’t say aces get it nearly as bad as trans folks do, but it’s coming from the same people, it circulates in the same groups.

I’m not sure what to make of all the news articles framing aces as harmless.  As the podcast points out, trans people are also harmless.  But also, I was thinking, aces need to up our game.  We need to punch more fascists, destroy more marriage, annihilate more man.

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