[sticky entry] Sticky: About me

Jan. 31st, 2019 05:24 am
brithistorian: (Default)
(Updated 26 Dec. 2023)

This is based on a similar post by [personal profile] aeonwren , which I thought included a lot of good information - a sort of "users' manual for this journal and its author." 

The basics:
 
50-something, white, neurodivergent (autism, anxiety, ADD, depression), male. United States (far northern - more specific location information is presented only in f-locked posts). Former medical transcriptionist, working on career change to museum work.  Master's degrees in both history (primarily British history) and art history/museum studies. Married. He/him pronouns.
 
The blog:
 
I write about music, art, books, comics, manga, video, fandom, history, current events, the Olympics, and anything else that tickles my fancy. There will be personal posts (mostly under f-lock).    

I am, as my wife puts it, "easily amused," so consequently a statement that I liked something should not be taken as an indicator of quality. I have a tendency to speak in absolutes in the heat of the moment, then have to walk back my statements after I think further about things.

You can find my comment policy here and my fanfic here (AO3) and here (asianfanfics.com).  Note that all fanfic at asianfanfics is also posted at AO3 but there is fanfic at AO3 that is not posted at asianfanfics.
 
The fandoms:
 
I’m a multi-fandom, multi-shipper kind of person.  I'll read fic for fandoms where I've never read (viewed, played, etc.) the canon.  Hell, I'll write fic for fandoms where I've never read the canon.  I will read and write real person fic.  My sense of fandom is very much more aligned with transformational fandom than with curatorial fandom.  (And the fact that I know and use those terms should tell you something about my fandom.)  
 
The "interests" section of my profile is perpetually out of date; I really should get around to updating it.
 
 
Subscription/access/commenting policy:
 
Any entry that contains my location on a level more precise than which region of which country, as well as any entry with substantial information about my family, will be under f-lock.  This is not because I have illusions of being able to keep my online identity and my "real world" identity separate, just that I don't want to make it any easier for anyone who wants to gather information on me.  I give out access pretty freely, though - access and subscription are still pretty closely linked in my mind; once you've demonstrated that you're a real person who I find interesting and who expresses an interest in me, I tend to give you access.  (Not that there have been too many f-locked posts recently anyway.)

Feel free to comment on my entries even if we haven’t talked before, or if you don’t feel you have a lot to say. Short comments are love. Emojis or <3 are great.
 
I think I've finally gotten in the habit of including verbal descriptions of pictures I post.  If you need any other sort of accessibility to be able to enjoy my journal, please let me know.  I've deliberately kept the layout clean and simple because it's also the layout I use when reading my f-list and that's what works best for me.
 
 
A note on languages and how I comment:
 
As much as it pains me to say it, I'm functionally monolingual in English.  I'm currently studying French, Japanese, and Korean, and I have in the past also studied Spanish, German, and Swedish.  If you really want/need to comment to me in a foreign language, I could probably - given sufficient time and access to reference materials - read simple comments in French and German, very simple comments in Japanese, Swedish, and Spanish, and a handful of simple nouns and common phrases in Korean (hello, thank you, I'm sorry, man, woman, child, book, etc.).

Another language I don't speak is sarcasm.  I don't tend to use it, and if you use it on me, I'm more likely than not to take you literally.  I'm also not a fan of April Fool's jokes - any post I make on April 1 will be no less truthful than the posts I make on other days.
 
I'm always happy to talk, so hit me up if any of this interests you.
 
Comments on this entry will be screened, so you can ask me anything or introduce yourself in private if you want!

Addition (25 February 2023):

Knowing where you are:

I like knowing where my readers are, so I'm aware of when/if any of them are affected by various world events and also because it helps me to remember to include context for people outside the US when I think it might be necessary. 

To be honest, this is also because I tend to remember information, at least in part, geographically and visually. When reading a history book, I remember the information better if I have a map to locate the events on. (Even better is if I also have photos, drawings, or paintings of the dramatis personae.)

To facilitate this, I've set up a post here were you can comment with your location in as much or as little detail as you feel comfortable, if you feel comfortable. The comments are screened, so only I will see them.

[sticky entry] Sticky: Books read log

Jul. 29th, 2025 08:56 am
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I created this post on 2 Dec. 2024, when I decided to start keeping a books-read log as part of my Dreamwidth journal. Each month will get a new post, to be updated as the month progresses, and links to the monthly logs will be kept in this post, which will be both stuck to the top of my journal and linked from my profile.

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Today I finally had sufficient time around lunchtime to try Cincinnati chili. I fixed it according to the article on "How to Eat Cincinnati Chili Like a Local" and then sat down to eat it. I didn't like the first bite. So I ate some more, hoping it would get better with further exposure. By the time I had eaten half of the serving, I gave up and decided I just didn't like it. So I disposed of it, brushed my teeth, then brushed my teeth again because I could still taste it in my mouth. I wish I liked it, because the concept sounded interesting, but I don't.

I think I might try eating "regular" chili on spaghetti, because it wasn't the "on spaghetti" part that I disliked, but in the meantime I'm over here eating peppermints one after another to try to clear the taste in my mouth. (I'm really not trying to be overly dramatic here. It's just very rare that I try something and don't like it, so I'm having trouble coping with it.)

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New Year Book Meme, via [personal profile] trobadora:

  1. Grab the nearest book.
  2. Turn to page 126
  3. The 6th full sentence is your life in 2026.

Here's mine: The book nearest at hand to me is Japanese Soul Cooking by Tadashi Ono and Harris Salat. Page 126 was a page of photographs, page 127 was a mini table of contents for a chapter, so the next full page of text is page 128, where the 6th sentence is "The cities and towns on the western side of Japan, like Osaka and Hiroshima, are the okonomiyaki heartland," which is an interesting fact, but I'm not sure how to take is as a fortune!

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Last month I read Beggars in Spain after [personal profile] sanguinity recommended it in the comments to a post I wrote in which I (once again) objected to the necessity of sleep. I enjoyed it — enough that I'm currently reading the sequel — but I do have one objection to it that I perceive as a major flaw.

The premise of the book, as laid out in the first chapter, is the existence of genetically modified people who don't need to sleep. And we do get that. But we also get these same people having a number of other useful genetic modifications, one of which is that they're effectively immortal[/1]. Plus we also get a society with more or less infinite free energy.

And this is something that I've seen in a lot of science fiction (Robert Heinlein and Kim Stanley Robinson[/2] do it a lot): The problems of aging and energy are so large that they easily overshadow any other issues you might want to address, so you hand-wave them away so you can look at the other issues. Unfortunately, I don't feel like the issues of aging and energy are waved far enough away in Beggars in Spain, so that the issue of sleeping or not becomes negligible by the time you're about a third of the way into the book. The fact that the genetic modifications that created the sleepless also make them effectively immortal pretty much completely overshadows the issue of them not needing to sleep: When one group of people have an expected lifespan of 75 or so and the other has an expected lifespan of infinity, what does it matter that the second group gets an additional 35% of infinity?

Now it's possible that Kress addresses this issue in the second and third volumes of the series (I'm only about 15 pages into the second book). Or it's possible that she decided that lack of need for sleep wasn't really issue she wanted to address at all. But based on the reason that sent me to the book and the premise presented in the first few chapters of the book, it feels like a flaw in the book.

[/1] In the role-playing community in the 1980s, we called this "limited immortality" — you live forever unless you get killed.

[/2] It felt awkward to write "Heinlein and Kim Stanley Robinson," but at the same time, I didn't feel at all comfortable that people would know who I meant if I wrote "Heinlein and Robinson," so I've a stylistic decision that Heinlein, Asimov, McCaffrey, et al. don't get to be mononymous in my writing just because they happened be the first (or one of the first) to become famous while having an uncommon (in America, at any rate) surname.

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“By far the dominant reason for not releasing sooner was a reluctance to trade the dream of success for the reality of feedback.” (Kent Beck, software engineer)

I find I do this a lot. I spend time "planning" or "gathering knowledge," often until I lose interest in the thing before ever actually trying to do the thing. While I recognize that this is often an attempt to try to avoid the awkward phase where I'm learning the thing and can't really help doing the thing badly, it's still hard to put that recognition into action. I don't really do new year's resolutions, but I'm trying right now to try to more actively recognize when I'm doing this and take action to stop myself from doing it. So, with that being said, I'm going to take the air-dry clay that I got for Christmas out of its package and go make some awkward looking sculpture!

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Happy New Year, everyone!

I just finished reading The Georgian Feast: The Vibrant Culture and Savory Food of the Republic of Georgia by Darra Goldstein. I started reading it after I saw it mantioned in an article that Z. showed us about the Georgian word "shemomechama," which can't really be translated into English, but basically means "I ate too much, but it wasn't really my fault — it was the food's fault for being so delicious."

This was an interesting book, primarily because it wasn't just a cookbook. The first 60 pages were a series of essays about Georgian foods and food culture, meant to prepare you for the recipes that follow. And yet I don't think that anything — short of actually going to Georgia (which one of my uncles did back when it was still part of the Soviet Union) — could actually prepare me for Georgian cooking, which combines recipe I never would have expected in ways I never would have expected. I encountered more recipes that called for walnuts in this cookbook than I had in the rest of my life. And not just in sweet recipes. For example, on page 100 there's a recipe for Chicken Bazhe ("katmis bazhe" in Georgian), in which a baked chicken is served with a sauce made of walnuts, garlic, water red wine vinegar, salt, marigold, coriander seeds, paprika, and cayenne. It's a combination of tastes that I struggle to imagine.

Another aspect of the Georgian recipes that kind of boggled my mind was the number of dishes intended to be served at room temperature. The part of my brain devoted to food safety would cringe every time I read a recipe and it ended with "Serve at room temperature."

Do any of you have experience with Georgian cuisine? If so, I'd love to hear about your experiences with it.

And to all of you (again), Happy New Year!

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  • 1 January
  • 6 January
    • Black from the Future: A Collection of Black Speculative Writing (ed. Stephanie Andrea Allen & Lauren Cherelle)
  • 8 January
    • I'm in Love with the Villainess (manga), vol. 9 (Inori)
    • Library Wars: Love & War, vol 9 (Kiiro Yumi)
  • 9 January
    • Giant Robot: Thirty Years of Defining Asian American Pop Culture (eds. Eric Nakamura, Francine Yulo, Tracy Hurren, Megan Tan, and Tom Devlin)
  • 11 January
    • 108 Asian Cookies: Not-too-sweet Treats from a Third-Culture Kitchen (Kat Lieu)
  • 13 January
    • Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America (Bridget Read)
  • 15 January
    • How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World (Deb Chachra)
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I hope those of you who celebrate Christmas had a nice holiday yesterday, and that those of you who don't had a good Thursday. Happy Holidays to those of you who celebrate any sort of December holiday. Things have been in varying degrees of chaos around here, and are likely to continue to be so for at least the next week.

Here's hoping that 2026 is better than 2025!

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NMIXX released a video containing both a holiday version of "Blue Valentine" (the same tune and lyrics, but with holiday-style backing music) and a rerecording of "Funky Glitter Christmas." Enjoy!

A couple of fun things to watch for:

  1. At about 1:38, Sullyoon comes out of a doll box, which is fun because people often say Sullyoon looks like a doll.
  2. At about 1:45, the toys have Lily tied to the floor, a la Gulliver's Travels.
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  1. Last night I discovered that Kiiras had released a Christmas song, called "Kiirasmas." I don't think I'd objectively say it's a good song, but it's still fun to listen to.

  2. A few years ago, I did a K-pop Christmas song Advent calendar. This morning, as I added "Kiirasmas" to my K-pop Christmas playlist, I realized that if I wanted to post the whole playlist one song a day, I'd have had to start back on October 15! ^^

  3. After having to spend 40 minutes listening to the store playing Christmas music while I waited for the pharmacy to fill a prescription. I'd like to say: No matter how Christmas-adjacent some of its lyrics may be, "My Favorite Things" is not a Christmas song. I'm willing to get seriously injured on this hill. However, if it means that I'll hear "The Christmas Song" less often, I'm willing to act like it's a Christmas song.

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When I order things from Japan and Korea, my goal for managing postage costs is to have the postage cost less than the item, which I'm usually able to manage. Recently one of my friends sent me a package from within the US, for which the postage cost 3x the cost of the item!

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NME (which seems have a much better of understanding on K-pop than Rolling Stone) has released a list of the [top 25 K-pop songs of 2025]! I scrolled to it, sure that I would have forgotten a lot of songs from earlier in the year, and was pleasantly surprised to see there were some I hadn't heard before, so it was like an early birthday present from NME!

I was also looking to see if NMIXX made the list — I've loved their new songs, and I was hoping that other people appreciated them. I was happy to see NMIXX's "High Horse" ranked #7 — four places higher than Blackpink's "Jump" (which I thought was highly overrated and wouldn't have ranked so high had it been by someone other than Blackpink). I then kept scrolling and was pleased and surprised to see H1-Key's "Summer Was You" ranked #6. Then I kept scrolling and was absolutely gobsmacked to see Huntr/x's "Golden" ranked #2 — I expected it to take the top spot, and was extremely surprised to find it in #2! So what was #1? I had absolutely no idea. I scrolled and was surprised and overjoyed to find NMIXX's "Spinnin' on It" at #1!

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This has been a super-stressful week. We had a somewhat lighter than usual round of medical appointments this week, but it was more than made up for by home repair appointments.

We had the garage door installation scheduled for Tuesday, which ended up not being completed that day, so the technician would have to come back Wednesday. Then Tuesday night I discovered that the basement drain was backing up whenever we used the washing machine, dishwasher, or kitchen sink, so I called the plumbing company for that, but they weren't able to send a plumber out until Friday afternoon.

Then Wednesday night, right after the garage door technician left, L. discovered that the washing machine was leaking (totally not related to the basement drain backing up). I tried to fix it, but ended up making it worse. So I had A. call an appliance repair service, who said they could send someone over Thursday morning.

Thursday morning the appliance repair technician came and fixed the dishwasher. Then I had to take A. to get allergy shots, then we went to Ricky's house, where I shoveled the 7-8 inches of snow we'd gotten over the previous two days. (He doesn't drive, but I had to shovel a path from the street to his door so Meals on Wheels could deliver and also to shovel his back stairs to he could let his dogs out.) I'm still sore from this.

Today I had a National Heritage Responders meeting (which went very well), then I had to wait for the plumber to arrive and fix the basement drain. We had originally had a noon to 3PM window for him to show up, which got pushed back to a 2:30PM to 4:30PM window and he ended up showing up at about 3:45PM.

All the house things have been successfully fixed, and we're planning to enjoy this weekend's cold weather from inside the house as much as possible. (It's -2°F out right now, and supposed to go down from here, then only to get as high as 0°F tomorrow, and not to get into actual positive temperatures until Sunday.) But anyway, that's why I've got a massive mental backlog of posts I want to make, and why I've got a folder in my email of comments from you that I want to respond to, and so forth. I hope you're all doing well.

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By the time today ends I will have shoveled our driveway and ways at least four times over the course of two days. We're finally getting a new garage door and opener, having needed one for several years. We had to wait for a non-standard-sized door to be ordered[^2], then once it arrived, we scheduled the installation for yesterday. Then, the night of the day before yesterday, it started snowing.

Yesterday morning, I called the garage door company to see if they would need to reschedule because of the weather. The woman I spoke to sounded almost amused by the idea. Since then, I have shoveled:

  1. Yesterday morning, so I could get our vehicles out and the technician could get his truck to the garage.
  2. Yesterday evening, so the technician could get his truck out of the driveway and I could get our vehicles back in.
  3. Early this morning, so I could get our van out and go to the doctor. This included shoveling the huge piles that the snow plows had deposited at the end of the driveway.
  4. Later this morning, when I got back from the doctor, I had to shovel the rest of the driveway so we can play vehicle Tetris[^3] and the technician can finish the garage door.

It's currently snowing, but not as hard as yesterday, so I may or may not have to shovel again when the technician has to leave this evening. Plus, I'll have to shovel the end of the driveway again when the city plows the sidewalks, which may or may not happen today. So I guess this winter's definitely giving me my exercise!

[^1] If you recognized the musical reference in the title, I'd like to offer my sincere apologies. If you didn't, please don't go looking for it — I doubt you need an earworm, and I'd prefer that you not think ill of me.

[^2] Because of course our house required a non-standard-sized door.

[^3] Right now we're forbidden to park on the street, so that the plows can run. When the technician gets here, A. and I will have to back our vehicles out of the driveway, then he'll back his truck up the driveway to the garage, then we'll pull back into the driveway. Then we'll have to do the whole thing in reverse when he leaves.

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  • 6 December
    • Komi Can't Communicate, vol. 30 (Tomohito Oda)
  • 9 December
    • I'm in Love with the Villainess (manga), vol. 8 (Inori)
  • 10 December
  • 11 December
    • The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture (Brian Dear)
    • Library Wars: Love & War, vol. 8 (Kiiro Yumi)
  • 20 December
    • Laid-Back Camp, vol. 15 (Afro)
    • One Salt Sea (Seanan McGuire)
  • 27 December
    • Komi Can't Communicate, vol. 31 (Tomohito Oda)
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I finally got an answer on my AO3 tag wrangling application. I was not selected. I'm feeling pretty pissed-off and crappy and unwanted over the whole thing. I'll be over here having a pity party today; feel free not to come — I don't even like interacting with me when I'm in this kind of mood.

ETA: A couple of hours later, I'm feeling somewhat better.

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An addendum to yesterday's QOTD from Jim Henson: When I was growing up, Jim Henson meant a lot to me. Not only because I enjoyed the shows and movies he created, but also also because I knew that he was also from Mississippi, so seeing what he was able to accomplish gave me hope that I would be able to rise above my geographic origins and do something worthwhile. When seemingly everyone who produces everything you enjoy or admire is from someplace else, you cling that much harder to the one example you have who came from the same place you do.

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Presented without comment, except that I have always loved Jim Henson and I agree with this quote 100%:

"When I was young, my ambition was to be one of the people who made a difference in this world. My hope is to leave the world a little better for my having been there." - Jim Henson

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About a month ago, NMIXX came out with their latest sing, "Blue Valentine."

I loved it — I've listened to it so many times! One part of it really confused me, though: From the start of the prechorus (at 0:40) until the beginning of the chorus (at 0:56), the tempo suddenly drops, then has an accelerando until the chorus begins. But I was really confused, though, because the line "You'll always be my blue valentine" in the chorus took the same amount of the time as when the same line was sung at the beginning of the song, but it felt faster. Fortunately, when React to the K (a YouTube channel that feature classical and jazz music students reacting to K-pop songs) did their video reacting to this song, they had an entire section where Liam (a classical percussionist) explains what's happening rhythmically during the prechorus — it took him almost 2 minutes to explain what happened in that 16 seconds of the song, but to me, it was worth it — I'd listened to that part of the song over and over so many times trying to figure out what was happening there, so it was great to finally understand.

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Music adjacent to economics

On BBC Newshour yesterday, I heard a story (which I can't find online at the moment) about Kraftwerk's instruments and equipment going up for auction. Besides the historical value because of their association with Kraftwerk, many of these items were inherently valuable because they're rare examples of early electronic musical instruments. The vocoder used on "The Robots" sold for about $200,000. The expert they talked to said that there were only about 20-30 surviving examples of this model of vocoder. I hope that these instrument went to musicians who will put them to use and not to tech bros who'll put them on a shelf.

Music adjacent to politics

Due to rising tensions between China and Japan (which I am forced to admit that I was unaware of), one of the cultural disputes going on between the countries is a petition in Japan asking Aespa member Ningning (who is Chinese) not to come to Japan. At the same time, Japanese performers who have built a portion of their career in China have been going out of their way to express pro-China feelings. I'm going to have read more about this situation. If any of you have a link to an article that explains what's going on, I'd appreciate it.

Music adjacent to fandom and statistics

In an article related to Blackpink members' performance at the Grammys, Rolling Stone referred to Blackpink as "(without a doubt) the biggest K-pop group in history, and has been for years." So of course ARMY (BTS's fandom) turning out in force, coming for Rolling Stone and bringing sales records, number of awards won, and chart performamce. the biggest K-pop group in history, and has been for years.) Within six hours, Rolling Stone had revised their article to refer to Blackpink as “the biggest K-pop girl group.” (A characterization that ONCE really ought to have something to say about.)

Music adjacent to bad machine translation

Weki Meki's Kim Doyeon won a Blue Dragon award (which seems to be the Korean equivalent of the Oscars), and her appearance on the red carpet caused quite a stir. The headline on one website uniquely expressed it by saying "Kim Do-yeon, Audrey Hepburn Reincarnation... a person who causes a single disease". I knew this was some sort of translation error, and asking the question on Threads led someone to clear it up for me. Apparently what they were trying (and failing) to say is that she is triggering an obsession for short bob haircuts.

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This morning I was reading the September 2025 issue of American Historical Review and I happened across two things that struck me as particularly interesting.

The first thing was a typical graphical matter. A page in American Historical Review contains 21.5 cm of text, of which 1 cm is occupied by the divider separating the article text from the footnotes, so 20.5 cm of actual text. A typical page is divided up with somewhere in the nature of 13 cm of text and 7.5 cm of footnotes. However, this being history writing, footnotes are prone to swell up to take more of the page. But I had never, in all my reading of history, encountered a page like page 1044[^1] of this issue, which contained 3 cm of text and 17 cm of footnotes! To make matters even more extreme, when I started looking at the footnotes, I noticed that one of the footnotes continued over onto the next page, so that actual ratio was 3 cm of text to 22 cm of footnotes! This was in the section of a paper that detailed the background historiography of the matter being discussed, so more extensive footnotes are to be expected, but even so, I've never seen anything like this before.

The second thing was a historical matter. It was at the beginning of Giuliana Chamedes' paper "Unpaid Debts: Socialist Internationalism and Jamaica's Bid for a New International Economic Order" (which also contained the extensively footnoted page above). I was so amazed by the first paragraph of this paper that I'm going to type it out in its entirety in order to share it with you:

In 1973, the General Assembly of the United Nations adopted a resolution calling for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) by an overwhelming majority. The initiative called for the literal and figurative settling of the debt between imperial and formerly colonized countries. Rather than just redistributing wealth within countries, the time had come to address wealth inequality on the world scale. To do so, the NIEO called for the reorganization of international trade, debt relief, the stabilization of commodity prices, and the institution of oversight for multinational corporations. It insisted on the protection of economic sovereignty for decolonized and decolonizing countries to "correct inequalities and redress existing injustices," suggesting that decolonization was an ongoing struggle. Many countries participated in the NIEO's drafting, including Jamaica, one of the founding members of the Group of 77 (G77). A "high point in the expression of a new internationalism, namely, that of countries emerging from colonialism," the NIEO represented a landmark in global history, as Sabrine Kott and others have argued. But by the early 1980s, the project was dead in the water.

My mind was blown upon reading this paragraph. Despite having a master's degree in history and having done a lot of reading outside of school in matters of history and politics, all of this information was new to me. I'd never even heard of the Group of 77. I read this paragraph a couple of days ago, I've done a lot of thinking about it since then, and I'm still trying to puzzle out how different the world would be if the NIEO had proceeded as planned.[^2]

[^1] American Historical Review uses continuous numbering across a volume, so this issue actually started on page 1009.

[^2] The phrase "the early 1980s" should give you a clue: The Reagan and Thatcher governments played a large role in stopping the NIEO.

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