Breadcrumbs In The Forest

The Princess Bride (1987)  dir Rob Reiner

(recs bolded)

Books

Michael Levy: Huck Finn’s America. Mark Twain and the Era that Shaped his Masterpiece. A really interesting and well-written non-fiction book that gives a good insight into Mark Twain’s life and historical context, and even makes sense to me as a non-American. @prettyboysdontlookatexplosions recommended it when I complained about Huck Finn being weird as hell. It was a useful in that it confirmed and supported with citations the thesis that yes, Huck Finn *is* weird as hell, Mark Twain was a personally, culturally and politically self-contradictory person, and it’s fairly likely that the ending undermines the moral and emotional climax of the book on purpose, so… yay?

JRRT: The Two Towers. (reread). I’m aging out of the first half of this book and aging into the second half of it.

Tove Jansson: The Summer Book. The author of the Moomin series wrote a book that’s about children but for grown-ups, a set of loosely connected vignettes about a little girl and her grandmother spending the summer on a small island on the Baltic Sea. Nothing happens. A funny and poignant book about an idyllic childhood and about how even an idyllic childhood on a beautiful island with loving family is sometimes deeply sad, just because being a small child is sometimes deeply sad, and of course being an adult is also deeply sad in different ways.

Zsigmond Móricz: Orphelina. A 1941 novella about an orphan girl being sent to various foster families in rural Hungary, all of them horrid and abusive. As a kid, I thought it was basically misery porn. Rereading it as an adult, it’s more than that, it’s sociography, and gothic folk horror, and very, very fucking dark comedy.

Robert W. Chambers: The King in Yellow. A collection of some iconic weird/horror fiction short stories, and some less famous and much lighter romance stories. They’re not completely disconnected though: there’s a sense that if a young American goes to study art in Paris, he might encounter mindbending supernatural horrors or he might fall for a pretty Parisienne, or possibly both. The most interesting stories are even harder to categorise. “The Prophets’ Paradise” is a delightfully creepy set of prose poems, and “The Demoiselle d’Ys” is a chivalric romance with something truly unsettling and ultimately unexplained lurking behind it.

Percival Everett: James. A modern rewrite of Huck Finn, from James’s perspective. I don’t think it works. Setting aside the premise, it’s a decent novel about slavery, identity and code switching, but as a commentary on Huck Finn, I’m not convinced.

Contes et legends de France (2003 Maxi-livres edition.) A fairytale anthology read to try and improve my French.

Comics

Kristina Stipetic: Alethia. Chapter 15. The brand new instalment of my favourite webcomic about robots experiencing existential angst, now in printed form.

Kate Beaton: Ducks. Two Years in the Oil Sands. A graphic novel memoir about working in the Albertan oil fields and how mining destroys the environment and also destroys miners. Bleak as hell, but full of brilliant observational humour.

Short stories:

M. R. James: “The Treasure of Abbot Thomas,” “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad,” and “The Diary of Mr. Poynter”. Foundational, creepy and at the same time slightly humorous stories about staid academic Englishmen stumbling upon the horrific. They didn’t leave a deep impression in me, but that’s probably because M. R. James has been a key ingredient in all horror (and much of dark SFF) for the past hundred years, in 2026 the original feels fairly unoriginal. Made me a bit nostalgic for the Magnus Archives though, MA is even more of an MR James homage than I thought.

C. L. Moore: “Shambleau.” Well this is interesting and weird and while Butler and Tiptree did the same thing better, Moore at least did it first. It’s very much a case of a woman writing men writing women, I can’t quite tell if this story is horny about aliens or dispassionately poking fun at other people being horny about aliens.

Fritz Leiber: “A Deskful of Girls.” As above, a supernatural horror which asks the question: wouldn’t it be fucked up if there was a girl? But in much better prose, and despite all the sci-fi trappings and spiritist nonsense more grounded in mid-century material and social realities, thus more successful at engrossing and unsettling me as a reader.

Harlan Ellison: “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.” Ellison wrote a creepy story then blamed a computer for it. Good creepy story tho.

Movies

Hayao Miyazaki: Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind. (rewatch) I could talk about the deeply meaningful historical and ecological themes, or the stunning visual worldbuilding, but instead I’ll just confess that Nausicaa is my favourite Disney princess. She is! She is pure of heart and she talks to animals.

Hayao Miyazaki: Castle in the Sky. (rewatch) Gorgeous, funny sci-fi adventure story about two kids caught up in the search for a magical (sufficiently advanced technological) floating castle. Dola the pirate lady is one of my favourite characters ever.

Hayao Miyazaki: My Neighbor Totoro. (rewatch) Two little girls go on cute slice-of-life adventures in 1950s rural Japan, accompanied by a forest god owl rat creature. When I watched this as a teen I already noted that it handled the theme of the mother’s illness very well, and allowed real sadness and real joy to share the same narrative. As an adult, I’m appreciating the granular detail with which the village is drawn, including uncomfortable class dynamics that are never verbalised but made clear through visual cues.  Also the lighting effects in this movie are unbelievable, weather conditions, times of day, light and shadow all feel so physical, it’s in large part due to Michiyo Yasuda’s colour design work, shoutout to Michiyo Yasuda.

Isao Takahata: Grave of the Fireflies. Deeply sad historical movie about two young siblings trying to survive in WW2 Japan. I acknowledge that it’s well-made, and in its strongest moment it makes a powerful statement about how the world ended, the apocalypse happened and everything else is an afterthought: but I couldn’t really appreciate it because I didn’t buy the central relationship of the movie. This might just be my personal baggage, but I would be more moved by Seita’s desperate efforts to care for and protect his little sister if the two of them ever acted like real children, real people (i.e. badly). Seita makes errors of judgement, sure, but he’s never impatient or unkind to his little sister, he’s never annoyed, he never raises his voice. His saintly behaviour, coupled with my previous knowledge of the original short story and the extent to which it is about survivor’s guilt, really distance me from the movie.

The Rocky Horror Picture Show. (rewatch) It was a treat to watch this in a movie theatre. It wasn’t a seasoned audience who yelled out call-backs, it was at least partly people who were seeing it for the first time, judging by when and how hard they laughed. Also despite being over-the-top camp bullshit, this movie contains some top-notch face acting.

Theatre

Thomas Köck: Beyond Fukuyama (BpSkizo Production.) Not good. I applaud the intent to critique the neoliberal end-of-history worldview, but I can’t applaud anything in the execution.

Other

Sóstó Zoo, Nyíregyháza. I love the Budapest Zoo, but its scope is limited by being in the middle of a city, whereas this one has tons of space, and all the animals have huge enclosures. The polar bear has its own massive climate-controlled building, it’s very cool, literally. A great park, and as far as I can judge, they treat their animals fairly well. Also, there’s two baby capybaras.

Old Hungarian Poetry Read On my Phone To Limit Droomscrolling

Ányos Pál (collected poems). His proto-Romantic sentimental poetry is super sugary, his political poetry is embarrassing grovelling praise for Maria Theresa, then an embarrassing flip-out about his son. (Him being an autocrat is fine and dandy, him using his unlimited power to promote religious toleration, now that’s unacceptable.) But funnily enough, Ányos’s epistolary poetry is much more readable. Still the same sentimental-pastoral language, but with more genuine emotion, more playfulness behind it, touching on topics like “hey my friend away in a war please don’t die”, “happy birthday mom many happy returns” and “doughnuts are delicious.”

materialist-scumbag

THE TICK THAT DREW THE MAP OF THE WEST June 28, 2026

So the longhorn was a garbage animal. Stringy, mean, half-feral, descended from Spanish cattle that had gone loose in the brush country for a couple centuries and bred for survival rather than meat. In Texas after the war it was worth maybe three or four dollars a head, because there were millions of them and nobody to eat them. The local market was Texans, and Texas was broke. Up in Chicago or New York the same animal was worth thirty, forty dollars, because the Union had spent four years eating its way through the eastern cattle supply and the cities were short on beef.

That spread is the whole engine of the cattle drive. You don't need a tick to explain why a man would walk a cow a thousand miles to multiply its value by ten. The arithmetic does it.

What the tick explains is the SHAPE.

Because the thing about the longhorn nobody in the romance mentions is that it was a carrier. Centuries in the brush had given it a shaky immune truce with Babesia bigemina, a protozoan that lived in its blood and rode around on a tick that dropped off into the grass wherever the herd went.

The longhorn itself looked fine. Walked fine, sold fine, butchered fine. But the cattle it walked past, the fat improved Midwestern stock that had never met the parasite, those animals would start pissing blood and die at a rate that touched nine in ten. The Texans, reasonably, refused to believe their healthy-looking cattle were doing it. They took it to the Supreme Court in 1877 and won, on the entirely correct observation that their cows weren't sick. The cows weren't sick. The cows were Typhoid Mary.

(The disease disappeared every winter, too, north of a certain latitude, which baffled everybody for thirty years until somebody worked out that the tick just froze to death up there, no vector, no disease, the whole thing seasonal in a way that made it look like a moral judgment on Texas cattle specifically. It wasn't anybody's leading hypothesis that an insect was committing the murders. The leading hypothesis for a while was that the longhorns were poisoning the grass.)

So now run the two facts together. The cow is worth ten times more up north. The cow kills every other cow it passes on the way up north. What do you get?

You get a line.

You get a bunch of lines, actually. Quarantine lines, drawn and redrawn by Missouri and Kansas legislatures and eventually by the federal government, declaring that Texas cattle could not cross at all, or could only cross in winter when the tick was dead, or could only cross by rail if they were going straight to slaughter and never touched dirt that a local cow might later stand on. Missouri shut its border. Farmers formed Vigilance Committees (which is a polite nineteenth-century way of saying armed men) and turned the herds back at gunpoint. Kansas banned Texas cattle outright in 1885. And every one of those legal and shotgun-enforced lines was a wall the drive had to find a gate in.

The gate was the railhead.

This is the part that rewires the map. The famous cattle town (Abilene, Dodge City, Wichita, Ellsworth, the whole gunfighter pantheon) is not a town that grew up around ranching or water or gold or a river crossing. It's a point where the trail coming up out of the quarantine zone touched a railroad that could take the cow east to the slaughterhouse without it walking through anybody's protected pasture.

Abilene gets invented basically from scratch in 1867 by a man named Joseph McCoy who looked at the map, found a spot on the Kansas Pacific that was far enough WEST that the trail in from Texas could swing around the settled farm country and its quarantine, and built stockyards there. The town is a loading dock. The cowboy at the end of the trail, in the saloon, shooting the place up: he is a longshoreman who has just finished a shift, and the shift was getting the cargo to the one point where it could legally change from hooves to wheels.

And the cargo had to keep moving west precisely because the tick kept the settled east closed. As Kansas farmers spread and the quarantine line marched west with them, the railhead had to march west too. Abilene to Ellsworth to Wichita to Dodge, each town flaring up and dying back as the line of legal infection-free transfer slid across the state. The towns weren't competing on amenities. They were competing on being the current solvent point in a chemistry problem about where a tick could and couldn't survive the trip.

(Dodge City lasts longest because it's furthest out, last to get caught by the advancing farms, sitting out where the quarantine couldn't reach it yet. Its whole mythological career (Wyatt Earp, Boot Hill, the Long Branch) is a few years long and happens because of an agricultural-settlement frontier creeping toward it at the speed of homesteading. When the farms arrive, the party's over. The party was always a function of the farms not having arrived.)

So the geography of the Wild West, which towns exist and why they're where they are and why they boom for five years and empty out and why the trail bends where it bends, is not topography and not destiny and not the romance of open range.

It's the intersection of a price differential and a quarantine map. The price differential said go north. The quarantine map, drawn by the tick, said you may only go north HERE, and HERE, and now not there anymore, here. The cow drew the route and the parasite drew the borders and the men with the guns were just enforcing a public-health regime they didn't know was a public-health regime.

And it all gets zeroed out, eventually, the same way these things always do, not by a hero but by a logistics upgrade. They build the Kansas City stockyards and the packing plants, and then the rail net gets dense enough that the cow doesn't have to walk to the train at all, the train comes to the cow. Refrigerated cars mean you slaughter in Chicago and ship the meat instead of the animal. The long drive, the trail town, the whole apparatus that existed only to get a tick-bearing animal across a quarantine line to a loading point, it just stops being necessary, and the gunfighter towns settle down into being ordinary Kansas, dry and flat and law-abiding, within about a decade of their own legend.

The cattle tick itself they finally beat in 1943, dipping every cow in the South in arsenic for forty years to break the lifecycle. Nobody made a movie about the dipping vats.

Make sure your bag can get you through scenarios where you are part of a mass evacuation, rather than you clandestinely leaving in the middle of the night to escape brownshirts.

I feel like thinking in this context will help folks prepare better and think beyond fleeing to the nearest border as their prime objective.

I don't like giving this regime more power than it actually has, so it is helpful to me to think about what I would do in specific scenarios. Planning for those gives me much more concrete action items, reduces my panic, and ends up preparing me better for unknown situations.

A lot of us have real fear of this regime rn, and escaping a Knock is a realistic concern.

But I feel like a lot of white, cishet, middle class folks are in oppression cosplay mode rn, and their brains aren't in a practical space for what the more likely impact to their lives is going to be.

If preparing for a Knock isn't also going to prepare you for facing sitting in traffic for 12 hours with no hotel plans because you need to evacuate a natural disaster on short notice, you should think a bit more about your risk factors and resiliency.

And yeah, I agree with @so-i-did-this-thing in a lot of ways. A natural disaster (or a man-made one) are A LOT more likely to present an immediate threat to most people right now. Especially because of this administration threatening to dismantle basically every disaster protection we've got from FEMA to NOAA. We are starting down the barrel of, at the very least, a wildfire season with an absolutely crippled wildland firefighting force. (And wildland firefighting resources respond to a lot of other non-fire disasters as well.)

An example of the hi-lo tone:

Which can then of course be modified to whatever your personal needs may be. This list may seem daunting at first, but most of what's on here is probably something you already own and just by shifting where you store it in your house (ie. putting it in The Bag instead of the cabinet), you're making progress towards the go bag

Thinking in chunks like this also helps make sure you're covered in various scenarios. As a trans person, I am going to make sure my HRT is already in a bag that I can move to my go bag.

The Timetables of History by Bernard Grun

I grew up with this book, which is frickin’ enormous, and it was endlessly fascinating to young me to pour over the side by side comparison of events taking place concurrently under different headings and in different parts of the world.

Or if you want something you can put on your wall, there’s this:

Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500

✨️with a special focus on colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure✨️

They Colonized Mars -- sf/horror short story; riffing off classic sci-fi; it's a lot of things it's the first part of a bigger universe I'm working on

Canis Lupus in the 21st Century -- even shorter story; urban fantasy playing off Native American vs European mythology around wolves

Things I didn't say from the ages of 16 to 21 -- poetry collection; archived from my notes app

I made this Elizabethan petal hussif for a friend who received an award for her historical costuming work. Hussifs were often used as sewing kits with spots for all of the notions you need for a project. Wives would send them with their husbands to war with extra uniform buttons and repair supplies. This one has an inner pouch area that can fit a small project or pieces thereof.

-the rightful heir is a baby and they can tell it’s the right baby because of a giant birthmark on his asscheek

-the main character’s only talent is singing and the rest of the pseudo robin-hood group just kinda tolerate him because he repeatedly fucks up

-he gets hypnotized into believing he is this amazing swashbuckling sword fighting hero along the lines of Wesley from the Princess Bride and ends up fighting the villain while snapping in and out of hypnosis

-the vessel with the pestle has the pellet with the poison, the chalice with the palace has the brew that is true “what”

-he stumbles his way through the entire plot and never knows what the hell is going on

-Danny Kaye is the funniest motherfucker you’ve never heard of

my bag is raising a lot of questions already answered by my bag.

my bag is raising a lot of questions already answered by my bag.

"Maybe not every household needs its own industrial-grade leaf blower."

"Maybe we should accept denser housing and shared infrastructure."

"Maybe private lawns should become community gardens."

all the way to

"You don't get control over your schedule."

"You don't get privacy."

"You don't get to choose your own aesthetics."

"You don't get to decide who has access to your emotional life."

"You don't get to opt out of communal activities."

"You don't get to have tastes that aren't socially approved."

Those are not remotely the same category of thing.

Some people treat all preferences as interchangeable units. They imagine a giant pile labeled "individual desires" and then talk about reducing it by 15%.

But preferences aren't equal.

Wanting three power drills when one shared drill would do is different from wanting control over your schedule.

Wanting a third car is different from wanting a bedroom door that locks.

Wanting a private yacht is different from wanting the ability to listen to music nobody else likes.

Wanting a 10,000-square-foot mansion is different from wanting to spend an evening alone.

The fact that these get lumped together is what makes the discussion so frustrating.

Because someone says, "Well, people will have to make sacrifices."

And I ask, "Okay, what sacrifices?"

And they think I'm being difficult.

No, that's the entire question.

There is a vast difference between "You can't get out-of-season produce on demand, because the resources needed to make that available are unsustainable" and "You can only eat food obtained locally or grown yourself or cooked yourself."

There is a vast difference between "We don't need multiple iterations of the exact same product under different brand names" and "We don't need gluten-free or high-protein or low-fat or vegan or kosher or other specialized food because those things don't' matter."

There is a vast difference between "Fast fashion with oil plastic fabrics made in sweatshops with quasi-slavery conditions needs to be abolished" and "People should only wear handmade bespoke clothing."

There is a vast difference between "Everyone should have the free time and space and resources to pursue hobbies like gardening, canning, cooking, sewing, knitting, and other crafts" and "People should have to rely on small-scale crafting to survive."

Using this database, you can access the names and biographical information of real people across Chinese historical periods and dynasties. You can go on here and find the names (not just given names but courtesy names and other sorts of honorary aliases, depending on the period) of thousands of real individuals, though it's almost entirely men in the older dynasties. Very few women.