Alright, I Am Back Home. I Have Internet Again. Let's See How Things Went

The second I saw your post requesting people to rant about shitty books one came to my mind first. The last dragon slayer. Now, when I had to read this in high school I was actually excited because for once I got to read a book with an interesting premise. Oh how wrong I was. The pacing in this book was so god awful that it was genuinely hard to keep track of what was going on. As cool was the world was, any information about it or magic was delivered in a way that’s reminiscent of dry textbooks. Never has a book disappointed me quite like that one did (and there’s even 3 more after it). Thank you for allowing me to rant about that hot garbage, I hope you have a great day :)

Your description of this book is similar to how I'm currently feeling as I slog my way through Fourth Wing. Especially with how the worldbuilding is delivered. Just dumps it onto you with large blocks of text unrelated to the current scene.

Dragons are too cool to have such bad books written about them.

I am once again calling for book rants. It was so much fun the last time, and I crave more.

Do you have a long standing grudge against a book you read in middle school? Have you gotten swept up by hype only to find that everyone lied to you and the book is trash? Do you burn with rage over the way an author portrayed your favorite mythology or folklore? Is there a book or series that you once loved, but now makes you cringe every time you think about it?

Do you want to vent all of it out to someone who won't judge you, or argue with you, but will simply accept all your feelings as their own?

Hi, that person is me. Send me an ask, anonymous or not, and tell me everything you've wanted to say. Offer me your anger, your frustration, your hatred. I will hold it for you. I will take it into my heart and make it my own.

It can be any genre you want, any demographic. I will accept it all. Even if James Patterson gets involved again. (I'm not scared of you, James!!)

I am absolutely obsessed with Dragon Age.

Please don't let me be obsessed alone.

https://www.twitch.tv/therobichaud

I was hoping to stream Final Fantasy XV tonight, but it is taking for facking ever to download.

Luckily, State of Decay 2 just got a huge update! So tonight at 10:30 EST, you can join me in hunting down zombies and trying to keep the survivors (and myself) sane

I think I'm done with podcasts made by men

I love listening to podcasts while I work. Especially ones related to history, film, and literature.

And damn near every time I try listening to ones that are made by men, I end up hitting a point where I have to stop listening and switch to something else. There's always a point where they say something that is so ignorant, blatantly sexist, etc., that I just can't take it.

Often times it's the host buying into a very male-centered lens of interpreting whatever it is they're discussing. And, you know, that's kind of expected. They're men. They're viewing things as men. I get that and I'm usually willing to just roll my eyes and move on. But then it keeps happening, or gets much worse than what can be excused by simple ignorance. And then I can't just roll my eyes anymore. I just want to start yelling. And that's not a good energy to have while I'm trying to do my job. So I switch over to something else.

A good example of this happened today. I was listening to a podcast called History by Hollywood. I found it because I'm a huge fan of History Buffs on Youtube. Comparing historical fiction to the actual history is fascinating to me. I love learning about the real event and how it's translated into fiction. But...it got bad. Real fucking bad.

Now, I can't place all the blame on the creators of HbH. They had guests who do a podcast that I think is called Green Screen, which discusses films through an environmental lens. And I definitely will not be listening to that podcast after hearing them today.

The episode was about Gorillas in the Mist, which is biopic about Dr. Dian Fossey. If you don't know who Dian Fossey is, look her up. She was one of the group known as the Trimates, sometimes called Leakey's Angels. The group consisted of three women who were expert primatologists: Birute Galdikas, who studied orangutans; Jane Goodall, possibly the most well known of the three, who studied chimpanzees; and Fossey herself, who studied gorillas. I would love to write hundreds of pages about how awesome and unbelievably badass these women are/were. Seriously, learn about these women if you haven't already. They are amazing.

Anyway, the episode was about Dr. Fossey. My first issue is that, despite her PhD, they never once referred to her with her proper title. This is upsettingly common with women who have earned doctorates. Men never want to call them Doctor. It frustrates me to no end. But that's not nearly the worst of it. They went on to discuss how she became pregnant twice during her time in Rwanda. She chose to abort both pregnancies because she did not want pregnancy or motherhood to interfere with her work with the gorillas. One of the GS guys commented on this saying "I suppose her reasons could be considered valid." Um, excuse me? First of all, why do you think that you get to decide whether or not she had valid reasons? You don't. Second, of course her reasons are valid. Whatever a woman's reasons are for having an abortion are valid. She's the only one who gets to make that decision. So fuck right off with that. Sorry for getting a bit heated here, but that really pissed me off. There was no need for a comment like that. Especially since it makes it sound like he doesn't actually think her reasons are valid, but is scared of catching heat so tried to sugarcoat it.

Moving on, TW: rape, they also got into the fact that Dr. Fossey stated that she was repeatedly raped by soldiers in 1966 over the course of two weeks. People freaking love to claim that this is "disputed" or "exaggerated" and some go as far as to claim that it was an outright lie. Why? Because she originally claimed that she was treated well and then escorted to the border. Later on, she admitted that she was actually beaten and raped. I'm not going to delve too far into this because a) this post is already way longer than I intended, and b) I will get SO MAD. For the sake of brevity, I'm just going to say that I believe that she was raped, and that she initially lied because she was not ready for this information to become public. The hosts however...well, they'd like to claim that they didn't come down on either side of this "debate" and simply presented facts. But they totally don't think she was raped. They went on and on about all the reasons that she would have lied about being raped, such as political clout, publicity, propaganda, and other dumb reasons. But just couldn't seem to think of any reason that she would have lied about not being raped. Gotta love how men are always able to come up with fifty million reasons why women would make false accusations. It's absolutely not in any way revealing how they think of women.

They also got into the admittedly shitty things that Dr. Fossey did during her time in Rwanda. She wasn't perfect, and she did do some rather bad things. Her approach to conservation work was very much steeped in a colonialist mindset. I'm not about to deny that. And they did do a good job of explaining some of the more overlooked facts of poaching--most African poachers aren't cartoon villains who want to destroy nature. Many are farmers who are killing animals that threaten their crops and/or livestock. And then they get offered lots of money to do it. It's not a simple issue, and doesn't have a simple solution. I don't have a problem with them addressing this, and I'm glad that they did. However, and this is a pretty big HOWEVER, they also didn't discuss any of the great things she did. She saved a huge number of gorillas. She helped improve the Rwandan economy. She fought against multiple colonialist organizations trying to exploit Rwanda and it's wildlife. She helped to revolutionize the field of primatology. There's so much that we know now that we only know because of her. They also decided that the fact that she's a heavily revered and respected figure in Rwanda was worth a few sentences and that was it.

They referred to her as cold and unfeeling multiple times, largely due to her relationship with Bob Campbell, who was married when they met. Apparently the fact that she didn't stick with him for her whole life means that she's cold and uncaring. Ugh. I just fucking can't with this.

And the cherry on top, they made jokes about her murder. Yep. Dr. Fossey was horribly and brutally murdered with a machete in December of 1985. And they apparently think that's funny. Now, I know that some of the people who were close to Dr. Fossey have also made jokes regarding her death. However, there are several Grand Canyon-sized differences between someone using humor to cope with the death of someone they loved, and some assholes with a podcast making jokes about the brutal murder of a woman they never met. They also said that it doesn't matter who killed her or if they're ever caught. Which...no? It very much matters who snuck into this woman's home in the middle of the night and used a machete to brutally murder her. It very much matters if this person is caught. I can't even imagine trying to say that it doesn't matter if an actual murderer is ever caught.

All of this goes into a huge problem when it comes to studying history, especially the history of science. Women are always scrutinized more heavily, always criticized with more vitriol, and always have their enormous accomplishments either left out entirely or pushed to side. I almost never see male scientists given this treatment. Edison comes close, but he always gets quite a bit of "Yeah, he was awful, but let's not forget all the awesome things he did!" Women however get "Yeah, she did a few cool things for science, but let's not forget that she had an abortion!"

I just can't handle this shit anymore. If you managed to get all the way to the end of this wall of text (yay) please recommend me some good history/literature podcasts created by women. I will love you so much.

Man, Dark Academia as a literary subgenre is something that I have struggled with.

On paper, it ticks all the boxes. A heavy focus on academic life, learning for the sake of learning, a love of history, linguistics and myth, the cutthroat nature of elitism, the hollow feeling of disillusionment. Just everything that should make me absolutely love it. Seriously, compiling all of those things together into a book should make that my favorite book.

AND YET.....every dark academia book I've read as been absolute garbage. Books so bad they made me forget why I love reading.

Donna Tartt, Alex Michaelides....it's on sight with these fuckers. I get genuinely angry thinking about these books. I was not even able to write actual reviews of them because I got so fucking angry whenever I tried.

Other DA books I've read have been mostly just meh. So forgettable that I couldn't even give a synopsis of them.

It's a subgenre that I want to love, but all of my attempts have failed so miserably.

I'm currently reading The Cloisters and Babel right now and if these are bad too, I'm just giving up.

I've heard a lot of praise for Babel so I'm hoping it's going to be a light in the darkness for me. But I also heard people praise The Secret History to the moon and back and that book's so horrible in every way that I literally want to burn it.

Please let there actually be good Dark Academia books out there. I can't take anymore disappointment

Oh man there's more

Projeto Identidade (Project Identity) is an exhibition in Rio De Janeiro, Brazil that is recreating pop culture images using people of color.

If I ever have to read The Catcher In The Rye again I will set it and myself on fire, it is the second worst thing I've ever read, right next to the first ten pages of Fahrenheit 451. There was absolutely nothing to that book, so substance, no stakes, not even an interesting slice-of-life story, just a meandering nothing that had no incentive to finish it besides "we're reading it out loud in class and your grade counts on suffering through it."

Holden Caulfield is the worst protagonist I've ever had to sit through, he's not even tolerable levels of teen brooding or the type that just needs some guidance and he'll be okay, he's just a judgemental pathetic asshole determined to keep his pity party going way past its due date because the world is so DARK and CRUEL and kids are so INNOCENT MOM you just don't understand how INNOCENT they are GOD (I will fight anyone who says "oh but depression" because he is NOT an accurate representation of depression- he may show signed of being depressed but he's an asshole and they are not synonymous)

I just couldn't root for this guy! I genuinely did not care what happened to him! I've had to read a nice few books I didn't particularly enjoy, but I could always find *someone* to root for, *something* to keep me going, but Catcher In The Rye? Nothing. The book could have ended with Holden choosing to live under the bridge like a troll and I wouldn't have cared.

And no I don't care if "the point is that it has no point" it's dumb and I hate it.

Anyway thanks for coming to my ted talk

I got Catcher in the Rye the last time too. You went much more into detail, though, which I always love to see. Your anger is mine now

250 posts!

Did it really take me this long?? Your girl has been caught slacking