Link Roundup: June 2023

I guess it’s just one of those months where I didn’t save links for this roundup.  Nonetheless, I will plug the Ace Journal Club’s discussion about why low sexual desire is considered a mental disorder.  And I have a single link:

Why Do You Always Kill Gods in JRPGs? | Moon Channel (video, 1:31 hours) – The short answer is that the evil god is capitalism.  This is a great video essay about the history of Japan, and how it’s interpreted through the metaphors of Japanese mythology.  Through this lens, Japanese history is a sequence of false gods, each rising and falling–from the Shogunate to Christianity to state Shinto, and now capitalism.  The game isn’t mentioned in the video, but it finally makes sense to me why Xenoblade Chronicles 3 is about a bunch of old immortals feeding on the life force of a populace doomed to die young–although I suppose that same story could have been written from an American perspective as well.

“Love is love”

In an earlier blog post, I facetiously said I would go after the slogan “love is love” next. Well, why not. This should be quick.

“Love is love” is a slogan that is used to legitimize queer love by appealing to the value of love. It brings to bear every cultural narrative of star-crossed lovers torn apart by circumstance or by society, and observes that homophobes are the clear villains of the story. Love is love, and why are you against love? What petty prejudices do you have that motivate you to support one kind of love and oppose another?  Also, if you read it literally, the slogan is tautologous, which is cute.

None of that is wrong exactly. The issue is that for some people, there are in fact substantive differences in how they love, or whether they love at all.

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Slogans, and “Born this way”

Back when I was in college, California passed Proposition 8, which notoriously banned same-sex marriage, after it had been briefly legal. Many queer folks my age describe it as a formative experience, when they realized that progress was not as assured as they had hoped. So you could say that marriage equality was on our minds. And so it was the heyday for all sorts of slogans. “NO H8”, “Love is Love”, or “Born This Way”–Lady Gaga’s single of the same name was hot during the brief window when I was clubbing.

“Love is love” still seems to be fairly common, but I don’t hear “born this way” nearly as much anymore. I’m bracing myself to be proven wrong–within moments of hitting publish, I will see a dozen different people independently referring to “born this way”, and a dozen readers will tell me that they had just taken a break from scrolling through “born this way” memes so they could read this article. But if I trust my personal experience, “born this way” is kind of out of fashion now, isn’t it?

Is that what eventually happens to political slogans? They live on in our memories, but we stop thinking about them? If so, that may be for the best.

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Origami: Turtle

Turtle

Turtle, designer unknown.  ETA: I have identified the model as Baby Sea Turtle by Neige A.

You know, I posted a sketch of this same model, but I don’t think I had ever posted a photo of the model itself?  Well, here it is.

As I mentioned before, someone at the origami meetup taught me how to make this.  If I recall correctly, he did not represent himself as the designer, which leaves the designer unknown to me.  I could not find any similar models online.  Nor do I remember quite how to make it.  That said, I could probably reverse engineer it if needed.

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Bros movie review

cn: This review makes no attempt to avoid spoilers

Bros is a 2022 gay romcom described as the first movie of its kind to be made by a major studio. It is most certainly not the first movie of its kind in general. I’ve spent quite some time dare I say dumpster diving for gay movies, so I can tell you that the two most common categories are the high school coming out slash romance, and the adult romance. Bros is an example of the latter, and I pleased to say that the mainstreamification did not really compromise the vision of this particular subgenre. It just got a bigger budget, and the acting and writing got a lot more polish. No, the main problems with Bros are problems that are common to its source subgenre, which makes it a great subject for discussion.

The movie is about a romance is between Bobby an out and proud effeminate gay podcaster and LGBTQ museum curator, and Aaron, a ripped jock.  To illustrate the interests and issues with the movie, I’ll begin by describing one small arc.  At one point, Bobby runs into Aaron giving himself a testosterone injection, apparently to maintain his muscled physique. Bobby questions him, and Aaron says all his friends do it, and it “doesn’t seem to bother you when you’re obsessing over my body”. Bobby says fair enough.
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Ranking the Cyan games (again)

By In April, I wrote a ranking of all the Myst games. I emphasized that the list was a “recollective” ranking based on how I remembered them, as opposed to a “retrospective” ranking based on giving them a fresh look. Well, I gave them all a fresh look, and that caused my assessments to move around.

For the Myst games, I watched Keith Ballard’s blind Let’s Play series, which lets me see the games through the eyes of a new player. I also replayed Obduction, and added the new game Firmament—at which point this is no longer a Myst ranking, but a Cyan games ranking.

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The veil of gender ignorance

One of the common TERF talking points is, “If I grew up today, I would have (wrongly) believed I was trans.” As with many TERF arguments, there’s also an anti-ace analogue: “If I grew up today, I would have sooner believed I was bisexual heteroromantic than just gay.” I’m going to take an analytical approach to understanding and countering these arguments.

The veil of ignorance

We can start by borrowing an idea from political philosophy: the veil of ignorance. We imagine that we have the opportunity to construct a society however we wish. Afterwards, we get to take our place within the society. The catch is, we don’t know which place we will take. So we don’t want the society to unfairly favor one group over another, because we may end up taking the unfavored position.

The veil of ignorance is particularly well-suited to this problem, because it’s pretty close to what we’re actually doing. We choose the cultural and social messages that are conveyed to the next generation. And, in order to make that choice, we imagine ourselves in the shoes of the next generation. “If I grew up today…”

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