Welcome to my monthly link roundup, where I share and comment links to interesting articles I’ve found in the last month.  Additionally, I will share links to my own writing that appeared elsewhere.

My writing

Carnival of Aces: Quarantine – This is a blogging carnival I hosted last month, which prompted ace writers to talk about their experiences during the pandemic.  While this was an event for ace bloggers, not all the articles have to do with asexuality.  There’s a pretty wide range of personal experiences here, if you’re interested.

græ tells painfully familiar stories– I did something unusual and wrote a lyrical analysis of Moses Sumney’s album græ.

Ace Day was Incompetently Organized – I engage in activist drama.  Probably not of interest to most people.

Interesting articles

How South Korea’s Nightclub Outbreak Is Shining an Unwelcome Spotlight on the LGBTQ Community | Time – In South Korea there was an outbreak associated with a gay nightclub.  This causes problems with their contact tracing strategy because people didn’t want to publicly out themselves.  It sounds devastating.  By the way, this story is from early May, but I haven’t really seen any updates in English news so I don’t know what happened.

Images From a Worldwide Protest | Atlantic – I initially believed, incorrectly, that recent BLM protests were only really big in the US, because I thought the state of US police was uniquely bad.  Somebody pointed out that if you google it you can find many many articles showing otherwise, and here’s one.  When your protest goes global, that’s a huge deal.  What I’m not sure of, is the extent to which police in other countries have been responding to the protests with brutality.

What to Do When Your Video Game Gets Co-opted by Neo-Nazis | OneZero – I’ve never actually heard of Crusader Kings before, until their dev blog mentioned that they were including an asexual option in Crusader Kings 3.  There were several articles gawking or mocking the idea, which pinged my Google Alerts on asexuality.  My own reaction was of pleasant bemusement.  Later I found out that this was part of a strategy to scare away the Nazis who had taken a liking to Crusader Kings 2.  It tickles me to think that the mere presence of asexuality scares away Nazis.

Cringe | ContraPoints (video) – So, it’s 83 minutes.  It develops a fairly comprehensive theory of different kinds of “cringe” and what motivates them.  It also details some examples where people have become morbidly obsessed with cringing at some particular individual.  This is comparable to that 2017 video about parasocial relationships, which pointed out a pattern that absolutely pervades the internet, and once you recognize it, you see it everywhere.

building your online brand | Brian David Gilbert (video) – Just for fun.  There’s a lot to be said about content creators who focus on a narrow “brand”, but perhaps for now the subject is better left to satirical music videos.