Yeehaw

the main character is this guy named din who's an apprentice investigator with mental augmentation to make him an "engraver," someone who can remember everything perfectly. he's a strait-laced guy but his shameful secret is that he's dyslexic and can't memorize text on sight like an engraver is supposed to. his boss ana is a quirky genius who annoys everyone else to death but he's always just like "I couldn't say, ma'am" to her bullshit. she's delightful and their relationship is very funny. she is a big time freak who wears a blindfold bc she thinks better with one of her senses dulled but she's also a genius detective and only she can solve the mysterious case...

which is that a tree grew out of a guy's body killing him instantly. pretty sick. there is quite a bit of gory imagery but it wasn't too extreme for me. also the reason they can give themselves all these superpowers is there are gigantic beasts that live in the sea and try to clamber up on land every now and then and their blood has powers. you gotta kill them at the sea walls so they don't destroy cities but you also gotta collect the blood and bones to do magic shit

it's like a twisty fantasy mystery. the main character is a member of the lgbt community. so literally what else do you need to know. the one thing that pissed me off is there was a map at the front and a list of all the imperial ranks but I wanted a god damn glossary. I don't mind a fantasy animal or rank or slang term but I want to be able to flip to the back of the book and remember what they mean

tl;dr: There's no evidence the interview that this was mentioned in even exists, no evidence the route of the cable has ever changed, and the whole story seems to originate from one dude's podcast.

>thread is from 13 years ago

1. Imagine you’re a powerful wizard

For personal context, before I went to the '98 Burning Man festival, one of the things I'd read from a couple different journalists was that "everybody" runs around naked. Which, fine by me, I'd already spent a lot of time in clothing-optional spaces, I'm not fanatic about it but it's nice.

So I got there early and set up a public shade structure on one of Black Rock City's main roads and spent most of each afternoon just watching the crowds go by. I don't remember seeing more than one actually naked person the whole week. I think a topless woman passed by my intersection maybe every half an hour, sometimes once an hour. So why in the hell were people, normally pretty smart and observant writers, coming away with the impression that everybody was naked?

Then I remembered an unrelated passage from Joel Garreau's great book about the history of the outer-ring suburbs, Edge City. Mall developers told him flat-out that they tried to keep the crowds in their malls less than 5% black. Not because they themselves were racist, but because they had determined, experimentally, that if more than 5% of the people in the mall are black, the median white shopper will wrongly describe the mall as at least half black, as mostly black. And not a few of them would describe it, at 6% black, as a mall where "only black people go." Why?

Because, emotionally, they were still upset over the last one when the next one came into view.

1. the artist is still alive and benefitting from you engaging with the art

2. the art is deeply fucking reflective of every single (and there’s so many) way(s) the author is bigoted as fuck.

compare hp lovecraft, who also wrote a bunch of stuff that was obscenely racist. however, hp lovecraft is dead as shit and can’t do anything bad with the money. jk rowling is using your money from harry potter merch to wreck the lives of minorities

People wanna pretend it was all in good fun and only got racist afterwards (if they'll even acknowledge it ever was racist) meanwhile some of the earliest TikTok making clanker jokes were skits that were just "racist dad hates his daughter's black boyfriend" only the boyfriend is a robot instead, and before that, these exact same kinds of jokes were circulating the Star Wars fandom for over a decade