and right now still dreaming

Except it’s only ever the ‘I hate apartheid’ line that’s shared, and not the actual quote in its full context. Because here it is:

If we consider what Merton College and what the Oxford School of English owes to the Antipodes, to the Southern Hemisphere, especially to scholars born in Australia and New Zealand, it may well be felt that it is only just that one of them should now ascend an Oxford chair of English. Indeed it may be thought that justice has been delayed since 1925. There are of course other lands under the Southern Cross. I was born in one; though I do not claim to be the most learned of those who have come hither from the far end of the Dark Continent. But I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones; and most of all I detest the segregation or separation of Language and Literature. I do not care which of them you think White.

Which is to say. This isn’t exactly the antiracist quote of the century, to say the least. This is a white South Africa born man and a white Australian shaking hands and going ‘omg we relate’ and expressing what is a very, very mild ‘segregation is not great’ opinion in order to convey his thoughts on an academic subject, ie the confluence of language and literature. Using race to make a point about his own subject of interest, in his own interest, which is, amusingly enough, what a lot of ostensibly well meaning progressive seem to be doing.

I also think that some of the general surprise around ‘what do you mean large swathes of the Tolkien fandom are incredibly conservative!?’ in lib/left Tolkien fandom is the result of a tendency in said parts of the fandom to transpose one’s own progressiveness onto Tolkien and turn a blind eye to things like, say, the Shire being a very specifically mid-century British racist construct that is very, very clear in its politics, often going so far as to insist it’s anarchist or an ideal society or whatever the fuck… and then getting really Pikachu-meme ‘but they’re misreading it’ every single time a conservative explains exactly what it is about the legendarium that they really love, and get surprised when someone uses the Shire being a racist construct to do more racism. It is 2026 let us do away with ‘I don’t see colour’ interpretations of media, I beg. Nobody is cancelling you for enjoying a book that is not kind to race. Most of the books I love are not kind to race.

I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.

Found an article on this in English

Also a different, unrelated article about concerns & possible violation of international law in using another of the film’s locations

like that's how you know when men say they "can't find" the clit that shit is on purpose and they just don't want to interact with it. like to me that was just proof. if someone's clit is big enough that men cannot plausibly argue they "can't find" it, then they literally try to cover it up so they can pretend it doesn't exist.

intersexualized people often get their clits/penises cut off when assigned "female" because to be "female" is to be sexually satisfying to men, and the ideological construction of men around "the phallus" is such that making sure men's clits are always bigger than women's has escalated to the point men want to imagine women don't even have them. they will cause the person genital injury and often a lifetime of painful sex with no ability to orgasm, as an infant, just to reduce the possibility that a man remembers that he is the same species as "women" and this is all just assignment at birth.

wouldn't want someone taught to define his identity as a "man" around his penis (taught to attribute his social power to it, taught to view it as a physical manifestation of biodestiny, taught to understand it as a symbol of his blameless inheritance of physical superiority & societal reward that he has no responsibility or even ability to reject) to experience a weird emotion upon realizing that women also have them.

wouldn't want to prompt anyone to question the sexgender naturalization project that is sexology. too dangerous. we'd rather mutilate bodies with clitorises too small to be ideal penises, and too large to allow men to forget they exist on everyone.

and like ever since this intersexualization project began, in pop science (or sex ed or wherever educational information about genitals is being prepared for a general audience) clitorises are presented as this purely theoretical body part that ~no one~ knows much about.

Found the clip I was remembering. Kat Blaque used this clip in a video trying to discuss transmisogynoir with cis Black women. Hearing TS Madison recount this experience really made me think of every time men want to ignore women's penises/clits, want to make a big deal out of a clit/penis being "too big" or too much like his own. Unfortunately NeNe is too transmisogynistic for this to occur to her, because cis women (just like the cis men) are overwhelmingly invested in this idea that the social class of "man" is actually a bio-destiny stored in phallic flesh.

Transmisogyny, intersexism, misogyny, patriarchy--they are inseparable systems. you cannot oppose misogyny meaningfully without contending with the literal structures of sexgender assignment as means to naturalize patriarchy.

this is not life-threatening, but also who wants weeks of diarrhea and a fucking parasite in them lol. if you suspect you've already had this and it's passed, i would see a doctor. you might need an antiparasitic anyway. if you're actively sick, see a doctor and they might be able to prescribe medication to help you get over it faster.

try to avoid eating raw vegetables, scrub fruit with a produce brush and rinse thoroughly with water. again, don't bother with premade greens or bagged salads. if you buy lettuce, remove the outer 2-3 layers of leaves.

respectfully, this is a very classic case of "people on Tumblr who self-admittedly don't know anything about the etiology or pathophysiology of a foodborne outbreak saying confidently incorrect things in a fear-mongering way." this reblog is going around on a post with thousands of notes and unnecessarily scaring and misinforming possibly hundreds or thousands of people.

cyclospora cayetanensis generally causes:

self-limiting^1 explosive/watery diarrhea & associated cramping/nausea/fatigue/weight loss

sometimes low-grade fever, vomiting, body aches, and other flu-like symptoms

^1 this means the infection will ultimately resolve itself, even without treatment

if left untreated, the course of the infection may last a few days up to a month or longer. it can often follow a relapsing course, wherein the person recovers for a period before experiencing another bout of the illness (e.g. in the more prolonged infections). in the large majority of cases where an immunocompetent person is infected, they will recover without any complications. as with any infectious disease, immunocompromised people are at higher risk and should follow more stringent avoidance precautions + seek treatment more urgently if ill.

incubation period ranges from 2 days to 2 weeks; if you come down with symptoms after eating fresh fruits or veggies/drinking contaminated water (or suspecting that cross-contamination with fresh fruits/vegetables/water has occurred), you should see a provider and get an O&P done to check your stool for evidence of the parasite. it can be treated with the medication TMP-SMX to shorten the course of the illness.

the "for reference, malaria is also caused by a protozoan" line as an attempt to provide context or reference point for how afraid people should be is uninformed fearmongering. this line is like if i said "be careful not to come down with a case of bacterial food poisoning--for reference, the black plague is also caused by bacteria!" it is completely nonsensical to imply that this organism is going to leave the average person reading the reblog surviving 'scathed,' as it were, or even not surviving at all, simply because there's another, different single-celled eukaryote that happens to cause malaria. you could have people going to their doctors afraid that they have something like malaria over what ultimately generally amounts to a treatable stomach flu.

and implying that cyclospora cayetanensis is inherently worse or more likely to be lethal than a bacterial infection, simply because it's "bigger and more complicated," is equally out of touch with the realities of bacterial infection. viewing bacterial food poisoning as "dangerous, but something you can expect to weather and survive unscathed" while seeing all parasitic infections as automatically akin to malaria is, quite simply, the result of having heard less about parasitic infections, and automatically assuming that the thing you (think you) know less about is scarier and worse by dint of being unfamiliar. go read about hemolytic uremic syndrome in addition to the above-linked articles on cyclospora, and then think about if e. coli should be de facto implicitly framed as no big deal compared to any given parasitic infection.

I received a free copy from Tor Books via Netgalley in exchange for a fair review. Release date April 7th, 2026.

I've heard excellent things about Reed's previous novel, The Fortunate Fall, so I was excited to get a chance to read her latest book. In What We Are Seeking, ship's doctor John Maraintha is unexpectedly assigned against his will to serve on an isolated new colony. Scythia has just discovered a possible new intelligent alien species, and John must navigate the tumultuous first contact while enduring both the colony's very different culture and permanent exile from his home planet.

I was immediately captivated by the strong, confident prose and the anthropological SF bent of the plot, which both reminded me strongly of Ursula Le Guin. Of course, Le Guin would do the same story in a exquisitely spare novella of a hundred-something pages, but that's Le Guin for you. There's a half-dozen odd cultures in What We Are Seeking, and Reed does an excellent job making them feel distinct. From John's fixation on poisons to the Ischnuran three-gender system, the ship-crew's overbearing paternalism, and the Zandahean post-Christ Christianity, cultural differences are the backbone of the story. And of course, it's hard to go wrong writing a first-contact story, the SF answer to the murder mystery. John and his fellow exile, the linguist Sudharma, slowly puzzle out the mystery of who the basket-men are and how their culture works amid the wildly different biology of Scythia. On Scythia, all plants metamorphosize into an animal, which in turn plants the seed of a tree or shrub.

Although What We Are Seeking is set among alien scenery, at its heart the story is about themes closer to home: sex and gender. John comes from a culture that finds marriage an abhorrent, unnatural tie, but his perspective is not entirely validated by the narrative. Yes, the Christian-based marriage as performed on Scythia is restrictive, but mostly due to the confines of patriarchy and heteronormativity. John's culture comes with its own lack of choice—the total separation between father and child, the taboo on reciprocal exchange in specifically sexual relationships, the way a man can't rent an apartment without everybody assuming he's a bottom. Sex is freer, but convention is just as binding.

While John is our only viewpoint character, my favorite character was by far Iren, who is in many ways more central to the fight to shape Scythia's budding culture than John himself. Iren is what we'd probably call asexual nonbinary, but their identity is discussed in terms of Ischnuran culture, where they're a jess, a gender non-conforming person who traditionally swears a vow of chastity. Iren is a lovely character, messy and nuanced and with complex feelings about the traditional celibacy. I do wish they weren't always filtered through John's point of view, though—John does not have a cultural understanding of any of this, and I feel we spend most of the time learning about Iren's experience through John asking insensitive questions. Iren carries a heavy narrative weight as effectively the only trans character who has to constantly explain their experiences, but on some levels that's a deliberate choice Reed has made. As the plot advances, it's slowly revealed that specific prejudices that kept jesses from being included as colonists, and Iren explicitly sees themself as the founder of what it will mean to be a jess on Scythia.