The Problem with NFTs | Foldable Ideas (video, 2:18 hours) – Incidentally, my husband started arguing with cryptobros on Twitter a while ago, and so over the past few months I’ve been learning a lot about how NFTs, while extremely absurd on the surface level, conceal many more layers of absurdity.  A dense two hour video is entirely necessary to explain the depths.

I also learned that I have a couple relatives who have invested in crypto assets. One relative said he wanted to learn about the process, so he spent $500 minting a now-worthless NFT; he said he felt pretty dumb about it.  Then he showed us his NFT, which was a randomly generated cartoon dude in a Guy Fawkes mask.  Another relative put a small amount on cryptocurrencies in one of those investment apps, just to track them.  He said they’re like stocks but a lot stupider.  They don’t pay dividends, they’re way way more volatile, and the entire cryptocurrency market is correlated, causing correlated risk.

How Disney Commodifies Culture – Southeast Asians Roast Raya and the Last Dragon | Xiran Jay Zhao (video, 2 hours, and there’s a part 2) – This is some incredible work, gathering all sorts of Southeast Asian opinions on every aspect of Raya and The Last Dragon.  So, I guess I’m Southeast Asian, although I don’t have much of a “SEA” identity and I’m not really one to ask about it.  But this video put to words a lot of dynamics that are going on around Southeast Asian representation in western media, which were previously only on the tip of my awareness.  It goes on discuss many elements of SEA cultures, and missed opportunities for the movie.

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Circumgender: A Gender/fucked history | Fox Auslander (zine) – This zine tells a story of a single microlabel.  It was supposedly coined by a 13-year old girl on Tumblr, but in fact the girl was the fabrication of a then self-proclaimed truscum (roughly means a binary trans person who doesn’t believe in nonbinary identities).  Now, the term is regularly mocked by TERFs, while also being “reclaimed” by a small number of people who identify with the experience it describes.  The original coiner collaborated to make this zine to beg people to stop.

You may have heard of the many microlabels that have been coined, especially in relation to asexual or nonbinary experiences.  These microlabels often have a secret history.  They’re not usually hoaxes–so far as I know–but they tend to be individual projects.  They rarely gain much traction as identities, but often gain disproportionate attention.  I have no ill will towards people who like adopting uncommon labels, and a few of them are more successful than you might think, but I’m extremely critical of resources that list all these identities without any real context on what’s going on.  If you’ve ever used the LGBTA wiki, please don’t, it’s completely littered with terms that were basically dead on arrival, and it routinely fails to supply that important bit of context.

‘Buy the Constitution’ Aftermath: Everyone Very Mad, Confused, Losing Lots of Money, Fighting, Crying, Etc. | Vice Motherboard – A cryptocurrency-based organization crowdfunded $40M to bid on a copy of the US Constitution, but ultimately lost the auction.  People donated eth in exchange for tokens that supposedly gave them voting power over a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO).  However, the details of how this governance would actually work was never quite worked out, and the decentralized organization was in fact centralized in all but name.  Even though the governance tokens are theoretically tied to a concrete amount of money, prices fluctuated wildly due to speculation and erratic behavior from the central group. I think if the central group was smart, they made a killing by making trades prior to their own public announcements.

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Just a couple videos in today’s roundup, and that’s probably it for me this year.  See you in 2022!

Disney’s FastPass: A Complicated History | Defunctland (video, 1:43 hours) – A detailed exploration of the virtual queue systems used in Disneyland and Disney World, explaining their advantages and disadvantages.  I grew up in Los Angeles and we had annual passes during the paper FastPass era… I didn’t realize how good we had it.  Although it is true that we had the routing problem of walking to the ride to get a FastPass, and then returning again an hour later to ride.  And the result is that my memories of Disneyland are strongly associated with listening to my parents bicker about optimizing the routing all the time.

I Found the Worst Christian Show | Big Joel (video, 37 min) – Joel watches episodes of Dream Motel, explaining how it often comes close to telling a decent story, but frequently veers off, defying conventional narrative logic.  A fun video, it feels like it provides insight into the American Christian mindset, although it’s hard to put into words what that insight actually is.  I wonder whether the show actually makes sense within the expectations of its target audience, or if it would just be perceived as bad writing.

While I’ve been quiet here in the past month, I’ve been busy elsewhere.  The Ace Community Survey released a new report, and survey.  And on The Asexual Agenda, I wrote about Jones from Gunnerkrigg Court, and about a constructionist view of attraction.   Finally, the Ace Journal Club read an evolutionary psychology paper.

Newton’s Fractal (which Newton knew nothing about) | 3Blue1Brown (video, 26 min) – 3b1b explains the Newton’s Fractals and where they come from, using some excellent visuals. I’ve explained before how my avatar is a Newton’s fractal–albeit from a non-polynomial function. Really I just messed around with weird complex functions until I got stuff that looked nice. Having had that experience, I’m a bit disappointed that people often stop at polynomials.  They’re missing out. Still, it’s rare to get visuals that are as good as in this video.  Also see part 2 about the connection to Mandelbrot sets.

How Bisexuality Changed Video Games | verilybitchie (video, 54 min) – An entertaining deep dive on playersexuality, and related topics.  Although many romanceable characters are mechanically bisexual, it’s often written with straight or gay players in mind, and the only way for the player to really express bisexuality is by romancing multiple people, which games treat as bad.

Here’s an idea: anti-playersexuality.  Like, a male NPC who is gay if the player character is a woman, and straight if the player character is a man.  Upon multiple playthroughs, the player is left to deduce that the NPC is really bisexual, asexual, or perhaps simply that the world bends to your choices but not to your will.

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In case you missed it, I published a couple articles on The Asexual Agenda this month: The search for an Asian ace masculinity, and I hate “A is not for Ally”.

On Doing Your Own Research | The Weekly Sift – Doug Muder talks about how experts can be wrong, but doing your own research can be even worse, depending on your own knowledge base.  In agreement with Doug, I think having a PhD certainly helps, because you understand what it’s like to understand something that only a few people in the world understand, and you also understand the kind of biases and mistakes experts make.  But what strategy could I recommend to most people who don’t have PhDs?  Are you just epistemically SOL?

I know what scientists are like, and that makes scientific conspiracy theories extremely unbelievable to me.  On the other hand, scientific frauds, persistent errors, and plain miscommunications are far more believable.  I’m reminded of an article in Wired that traced the 6-feet rule about COVID to old irrelevant arguments about the transmission of measles.  I can’t vouch that this story is 100% accurate, but it’s very true to my understanding of scientist behavior.  While the scientific ideal is to update your theories with the evidence, in practice scientists are financially incentivized to expound upon the value of their previously published work, even if that means perpetuating error.  And this causes a whole bunch of problems, most of which are far too mundane to ever make it into the news.

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Fixing Led Zeppelin with Autotune | Adam Neely (video, 17 min) – It’s common to hate on autotune, but at least some of the people who hate it are just thinking of that robotic voice effect, which is not really what autotune is.  This video applies autotuning to some classic songs, so that you can hear what it really sounds like.  The effect is fairly subtle, but you would be justified in complaining that it flattens out some of the expressiveness of the voice.  At the same time, I’m sure some listeners won’t be able to hear the difference at all, and they would be justified in being completely apathetic about it.

There are 48 regular polyhedra | Jan Misali (video, 29 min) – I’m interested in geometric oddities like this, because they’re artistic inspirations.  That said, I feel like he plays pretty fast and loose with the definitions and assumptions here.  Once he starts talking about regular apeirogons (which have infinite number of edges), it’s unclear what exactly distinguishes a regular apeirogon from a non-regular apeirogon.  (Wikipedia’s definition, “a partition of the hyperbolic line H¹ (instead of the Euclidean line) into segments of length 2λ” is not too helpful either.)

I’m also wondering what’s to stop you from constructing a “regular polyhedron” consisting of an infinite number of heptagons densely packed into a sphere.  Well, you can’t make origami of it, so there’s that.

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Microtonal reharmonizations of “Red Dress”: mostly a capella version by Stephen Weigel, and synthwave version by FAST-fast – In case you were wondering what this song would sound like if all the backing were in tune with Sarah.  I’m just going to say that this is what I was hearing a glimmer of from the beginning.

Reflections on Jason Voorhees, Virginity in Horror, and the Specter of the Anti-Sex Killer | Ace Theist – A deep examination of how slasher films–especially Friday the 13th–are said to kill off characters who have sex, and leave virgins as survivors.  These supposed tropes are not entirely supported by the text, and it seems that characters who show sex or nudity on screen always die, but the survivors are rarely described as virgins.  Nonetheless, the reading of Jason Voorhees as anti-sexual has some weight to it, and is particularly interesting in light of how popular Jason is as a character.  Jason as an asexual icon is… fairly problematic to say the least.  But I’m reminded of the discourse on queer-coded villains–on the one hand, it’s kind of terrible that there’s an association between queerness and villainy, but on the other hand, villains are actually awesome.

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