Those annoying updates…

So I have been writing on my phone for years. It started when my laptop began to succumb to old age, which meant I started using my iPad to write, and then Pages became standard on iOS, which made it very easy to switch between iPad and iPhone via iCloud, and now at least half my writing is done on my phone. I had finally got every setting at optimum for my extremely bad typing, the system was working, and though I had a few issues that bothered me, I was more or less content with the experience.

Then there was a fucking update. At first it seemed like a good update. Some of the more bonkers autocorrect quirks got ironed out, which was one of my main gripes. Like. I write mostly fantasy, and it would take entirely too long for the autocorrect to realize that yes, I am in fact typing sorcerix, and aera, and all those other weird, made-up words deliberately, and yes, I do want to use the British spelling for colour, thanks, and why are you correcting this word, a real actual word, the one I meant, even, for another similarly spelled word that is completely nonsensical in context? Like, I know track record is bad because my typing is Bad, because there is an intersection of ADHD and dyspraxia and I got stuck at a red light there twenty years ago and I’M STILL THERE GODDAMMIT but please give me tiny soupçon of credit please because I do have a decent vocabulary and pretty good spelling most of the time. So that was a fairly useful improvement, as updates go.

But ye gods. The way they handle autocorrecting now. Used to, if you backspaced after an autocorrect, it would just bring up a little pop-up with the original thing you’d typed, which you could just ignore and type in the comma, plural, quotation marks, etc etc. But now, backspacing into the autocorrected word HIGHLIGHTS the fucking word and you have to tap the screen in the text to unselect it, and if you don’t, because you are used to just ignoring the pop-up with the misspelled word, it will just fucking delete the autocorrected word/s and I fucking hate it. Fortunately for my sanity, it only does this on iPhone, but since I still do a ton of writing on my phone, it’s become a huge damned annoyance. I scoured the settings, trying to find a way to turn this off, but it doesn’t seem possible and I’m just really irritated about it.

Jelly Belly Boba Milk Tea Jelly Beans

I was shopping with my mother the other day and I found these.

A package of Jelly Belly brand jelly beans, boba milk tea flavored.

And, like many of the specialty flavors of Jelly Bellies, they were Not Good.

As follows:

Strawberry: I love strawberry flavored anything, but this tastes like they saved the strawberries in the back of a closet for a few years before they used them. Pass

Mango: I have never liked mangos. Mango flavor it depends, but like, every single mango I ever ate tasted like Pine Sol. These taste like Pine Sol by way of the mustiest corner they used the Pine Sol to clean.

Taro: I have never eaten anything taro before, but I would hope they don’t taste like purple dust.

Matcha: these were the least offensive, but as an aficionado of matcha candies, I am Not Impressed.

Thai Tea: True story, Celestial Seasonings used to make a Decaf Coconut Chai (Thai Style*) that was my favorite tea in the bag. It has been discontinued since about around Covid and I am sad. The flavor of these beans just makes me more sad, because it has none of the spiciness I remember enjoying at all. It just tastes like disappointment.

Check Your Sources, Bruh

So…I was a fan of James Somerton. If you don’t know who that is, he was a video essayist on YouTube who discussed queer media, mostly movies and television but with a few detours into comics, heavy on the history of queer folks in Hollywood.

I say was because Harry Brewis, known on YouTube as Hbomberguy, dropped a video yesterday utterly obliterating any semblance of credibility Somerton might have had. It was revealed that Somerton had heavily plagiarized nearly all his scripts from other, lesser known authors.

I was horrified. I had been following Somerton’s channel for over a year at this point. I had considered him a useful source of information, even if sometime he said things that made me kind of side eye my screen sometimes. But I try not to expect people to be perfect. I have my limits, but the older I get, the more I realize how complicated the world really is, and how some people deserve the opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them. I would hope other people offer me the same latitude when I fuck up, because I do. I have decades of fundamentalist upbringing that I’m still trying to overcome. Sometimes I speak before I think.

But something like this…this is not misspeaking, it’s not someone trying to unlearn our societal conditioning. It was exploitation, plain and simple, by someone who knew what he was doing. Within hours of Brewis’ video releasing, Somerton had nuked his socials, deleted his discord and Patreon, and removed commenting from all the remaining videos on his channel. Those are not the actions of someone who made an innocent mistake. The sheer volume of what he stole from other, lesser known queer writers and activists speaks quite clearly of his intentions.

The worst part of it is: this was apparently not the first time Somerton had been called out for plagiarism. It simply took someone with a better YouTube pedigree and a bigger following to make people actually listen.

It’s a terrible situation, but not a surprising one. We are all laboring under capitalism, and that means we don’t have the benefit of uncritically consuming anything, not even free media analysis on the internet. The Algorithm rewards quantity over quality every time, and we have seen time and again how people will do anything to game that system.

If there is a takeaway from this, it should be: always check the sources. In the current political climate, we do not have the luxury of accepting anything that is served to us on a digital platter as truth. Don’t be an unwitting perpetrator of misinformation and exploitation.

It fucking sucks to have to do that. I know. But if we do not hold the people who are disseminating our stories, our perspectives, and our history to a higher standard, we will continue to have people willing to bypass any standards at all in favor of slick production values, ad revenue, and societal capital.

Someone on Tumblr helpfully put together a list of the people and sources Somerton plagiarized. I reblogged it here. Brewis also posted a playlist of queer creators, at least one of whom was affected by Somerton’s plagiarism.

Reading Roundup, August 2023

First proper book for August is The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna

Book cover for The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna

This was another friend rec—Kit Kat has good taste in books! This was such a cute, sweet, extremely queer-friendly fantasy. It occupies an interesting cross-section of genre: romance, and a kind of cozy-ish rural fantasy. A lot of found family, and inter-generational trauma, which is why I describe it as cozy-ish. (I have a weird relationship with the term ‘cozy’ since it seems to be targeted largely at middle class neurotypicals who don’t get triggered by things like feeling horribly othered by society, the constant fear of losing everything because you live in an extremely disadvantaged economic bracket, or the fact that a majority of my country’s states are currently trying to criminalize people like me while the seas boil and the weather is actively trying to murder us all to balance things back out. Also, cozy mysteries are 99% about murder, which is the most un-cozy thing imaginable. But whatever.)

I’ve finished my relisten to Boyfriend Material, which I remember being entertained by but finding the ending a bit unsatisfying. I forgot how clever and amusing the dialogue got between Luc and his friends; it made me laugh out loud a few times on this listen. Since the sequel is out, I can forgive the abruptness of the ending.

Husband Material was about as far from what I had imagined it to be as possible. I feel like Alexis Hall was trying to say something about the performance of romance and heteronormativity but perhaps a romance series is  it the best place to do that? I feel like I’d need to listen to it again to formulate a more coherent opinion. I don’t think it was a bad book, per se, but I totally get why there are people in my book groups on FB who don’t like it.

I’ve also reread a bunch of things. The Wes and Finn shirts by KL Noone, plus a lot of other shorter stuff from her backlist—I really needed some comforting fluff. I also finished rereading Jordan L Hawk’s Hexworld series. I have some mixed feelings about cop stories these days, but at least these stories portray police, both regular and magically inclined, as the problematic and imminently corruptible forces they are? It’s not exactly a nuanced portrayal, but it didn’t ruin my enjoyment of the series. I heard that the second book in the spin-off series is finally in the works, so I might reread the first one soon.

My last real reading entry for august was probably Subtle Bodies by Jordan Castillo Price, the thirteenth installment of her Psycop series. It was interesting to see Jacob’s development! I have trouble keeping interest if series get too long, but I think I’m still interested in these guys’ stories enough to keep on, even if I have trouble relistening to the middle books .

I didn’t get much more reading done, I’ve been in a bit of a reading slump since the last week or so of August. Been going back through a lot of old fic I’d saved into my iBooks library. Some of that stuff holds up pretty well, even if She Who Must Not Be Named has totally ruined the Wizard School books for me forever.

Reading Roundup, July, Part 2

Clawing my way out of the slump continues apace. I made a collection in my Audible library of all the books I’ve been intending to get around to reading (or finishing *side-eyes the Clockwork Boys duology that I was almost done with last year*).

I’m also trying to actually read my library books. I finished Fourth Wing, found it pretty meh, unsurprisingly.

Audiobook cover of Ocean’s Echo by Everina Maxwell

Somewhat less surprising but equally disappointing was Ocean’s Echo. It got really good about halfway through but then the end just kind of…fizzled out. You just cannot drag out that level of slow burn and then leave it on the literary equivalent of unread. The emotional catharsis of Tennal and Surit coming back together at the very end just wasn’t there. Tennal is still going to be gone for six months, extremely far away, and we only have the suggestion of Surit starting up a new career. Nothing about the fallout of all the literal galaxy-spanning political issues. No future implications about the dissolution of their sync, which I would expect to have some serious neurological consequences. On the one hand I’m really glad Maxwell didn’t go down the whole ‘super romantic mental bond’ thing that’s so annoyingly popular with certain romance readers/writers, but at the same time I’d like to see a literarily competent writer showing how that would work between two people. It’s not something that happens often; the trope usually has the bonded pair finding a deep emotional connection without bothering to go into things like the lack of privacy such bonds would create, or what it would be like to know intimately every time your partner is annoyed, angry, disgusted, etc with you. (Admittedly that wouldn’t have worked with the nature of these syncs anyway, which is part of what made the idea so interesting to me.)

On the other hand, they didn’t seem to gain any real emotional intimacy from the experience either, which only exacerbated the lack of emotional impact in the way she chose to end their story. So unless she writes a sequel in which she illustrates how they end up building their life together, I will continue to view this as a good story with a disappointing ending.

Audiobook cover for Unknown by Jordan L Hawk
The third volume of Jordan L Hawk’s Rath and Rune series came out early in audio last month, and it was every bit as good as the previous two installments.

Audiobook cover for Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, The Complete Collection

I’ve been slowly making my way through the complete collection of Hercule Poirot short stories. I’ve also been watching the BBC Poirot series with my mother, and it’s been interesting seeing all the differences they made from story to tv adaptation. I’ve almost finished the audiobook, after months (it’s a whopping 35 hours)

I’ve just acquired the Complete Miss Marple Stories in the latest Audible deals, looking forward to that when I’ve finally finished the last hour or so I’ve got left of Poirot.

I finished the first four books of the Amelia Peabody Mysteries too, but unfortunately the library did not have book five in ebook, so I have to wait for inter-library loan to read it. Sigh.

Everything else from the end of July and beginning of March is a reread. After finishing Unknown, I to reread some of Hawk’s older stuff, so I read  The Thirteenth Hex, Hexbreaker, and Hexmaker. And I had a mental heath blip at the end of July so I reread KL Noone’s Kitten and Witch novellas, which are short and sweet. (I really hope she gets the third volume out soon, I want to read that so bad.) then I was scrolling through my Audible library, deleting books I’ve already finished to make room on my phone, and decided to listen to Rhys Ford’s Murder and Mayhem series again. That another series I’d  really like to finish. The author had some severe health issues that stalled the progress of the third book. She’s slowly get back to writing so I’m quietly rooting for her continued health.

Up next on my Audible playlist (as chosen by the Random Number Generator) is Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall, which will be a relisten before finally getting to Husband Material. I’ve also got three library books through Libby out just now: The Sunbearer Trials by Aidan Thomas; The Mermaid, the Witch and the Sea, by Maggie Tokuda-Hall; and The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, by Sangu Mandanna, which was recced by a friend.