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Does anyone else think of a giant bee with a cowboy hat when they hear the name Beehaw?
  • Some northeastern US accents do something similar. Not sure the exact term for it but it is a linguistic thing. Words that end in A get turned into an R sound, like Emma sounding like Emmer.

  • Who is your favourite author?
  • I don't have one particular favorite, but up there is Akwaeke Emezi, who wrote Freshwater and The Death of Vivek Oji (among many, many others). Something about their writing style just sings to my soul.

  • Latinx authors are renowned in sci-fi and fantasy. Why aren’t more of their books being published?
  • It’s very clearly been created and pushed by people who don’t even speak Spanish, so it’s perceived as very disingenuous and forced.

    The term "Latinx" originated in Puerto Rico.

  • What was your favorite read of 2023?
  • I loved I'm Glad My Mom Died! It was my favorite memoir of 2022 for sure.

  • Featured
    Recent finishes & Mini-Reviews
  • Yeah of course the comment on who likes/dislikes it isn't universal, it's just something I heard mentioned at some point.

    I'm someone who can struggle with minutae like what I mentioned in the spoiler section, so that's probably a big part of why I disliked it. Like I said, I do understand why so many people like it - Gabrielle Zevin has great prose and the overall character development is interesting and compelling. I just struggled with some parts.

    I'm glad you liked it!

  • Featured
    Recent finishes & Mini-Reviews
  • I recently finished Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin, and while I can see why other people enjoyed it, it was not for me.

    Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow spoilers

    I've heard that the people who love this book tend to not play many video games, and those who dislike it do, and that holds true for me. While the characters are interesting at times and their development was done pretty well, I just could not get over how the video game design itself was described. Like, take Ichigo for example. It was the first game they developed together and described in the most detail. They talk about the art design, and the story, and the gender of the protagonist, but never once do they say what genre it is. Is it a platformer? Action? RPG? The genre of a game is the most important aspect of it, because all gameplay and mechanics play off of it in order to tell the story.

    Not to mention the fact that some of the games did things that are really just not possible in gaming storylines, like that Pioneers chapter towards the end of the book. You can do that sort of thing in a text-based roleplay forum, but not in an MMORPG as described in the book.

    Also, while I was very young when some of these games were developed and wasn't in tune with technology then, some of the descriptions of it struck me as odd. Several times there were references to "burning out" several graphics cards and processors in a short amount of time trying to create certain visual effects in a game engine, for an indie PC game designed in 1997. Maybe computer components were just more delicate back then but... that just feels weird.

    Finally, Sadie's vendetta against Sam really bothered me. Not that she found some things that Sam did a betrayal or wrong - I might as well if it were me! What bugged me the most was that she forgave Dov, her abusive ex, much more readily than Sam, her well-intentioned (if misguided at times) friend. And what she was initially upset about was Sam wanting her to speak to Dov! I just don't understand that, and it wasn't well justified to me at all.

    Also, the shooting was unnecessary and only served as "haha gamers are violent" to me.

  • What was your favorite read of 2023?
  • I'll list two, nonfiction and fiction.

    For nonfiction, I'd have to say How to Say Babylon by Safiya Sinclair. It's a memoir of a woman who grew up in a strict Rastafari household in Jamaica. Safiya is a poet and she has a beautiful command of language that makes her descriptions lyrical, haunting, or painful as needs be. However, if you generally need content warnings I would highly recommend looking them up for this book because she does not pull any punches.

    For fiction, my favorite would probably be Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett (Storygraph went down in the middle of me writing this lol, will edit the link in later). It's a lovely fantasy novel set in an alternate Earth where fae are real. You follow a Dryadologist as she works on documenting a rare type of fae while she works on her encyclopaedia of faeries (hence the title lol). I enjoyed being in Emily's head as she worked through the problems presented to her, and as she interacted with her colleague.

  • What was your favorite read of 2023?

    Any format counts (audiobook, physical book, ebook, graphic novel, article, essay, etc).

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    Recent finishes & Mini-Reviews

    Just finished reading something and want to share some thoughts, but don't want to start a brand new thread? Feel free to post your mini-reviews here!

    If you'd like to start a more dedicated discussion, you are still free to begin a stand-alone thread.

    Please post any spoilers behind spoiler tags!

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    What are you currently working towards?
  • Just finished Aurora, gonna work on Vision and then Conflux. After that I will have all legendary runes, sigils, armor, and trinkets for my main. Still deciding if I'll do legendary weapons for my main after that or if I'll do other legendary armor weights.

  • Gender isn't real: it's just an idea
  • That portion is anecdotal. These stories come from either before there were ethics guidelines in psychology so people were studying their own children, or reviews of child abuse cases where the parent was forcing a different identity on their children. This is not something that is possible to (ethically) run an empirical study on, unfortunately.

  • Gender isn't real: it's just an idea
  • I was actually repeating what was said in a video I watched yesterday so I went to look at their sources - here is a relevant study that supports this conclusion - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1743609515339060

    However while looking it up in google scholar I did find another study that concluded the opposite, that there's no significant difference between identical and fraternal twins. That study is here. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-022-17749-0

    So it's possible that I was misinformed.

    As a bonus, here's an interesting analysis about what even is gender and gender identity in an academic setting. https://academic.oup.com/analysis/advance-article/doi/10.1093/analys/anad027/7204699

  • Gender isn't real: it's just an idea
  • Gender expression and gender stereotypes are societal constructs. A person's sense of their own gender is (probably) not. There have been many times where people have tried to raise their child as a different gender than the child was assigned at birth, and the child 99% of the time identifies with the gender assigned at birth, at the same rate as the general cisgender population. There have also been studies of identical twins where if one twin is trans, the other twin often is as well, at a much higher rate than fraternal twins.

    There is a genetic component and a constructed component to gender.

    Edit: wording.

    Edit 2: See my comment below with sources on the twins study - it's possible I was misinformed on this. The results of studies are mixed.

  • Featured
    What are you reading?
  • I have been reading the Wheel of Time series for the first time (by Robert Jordan). Currently starting Crown of Swords, book 7.

    Recently placed a request in my library for the following, hopefully they'll be coming in within the next week:

    • How Far the Light Reaches: A Life in Ten Sea Creatures by Sabrina Imbler

    • Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

  • What are you reading?

    Hey Beehaw (and friends)! What’re you reading?

    Previously I had these thread labelled as monthly threads, but I have had an incredibly busy few months and had not been able to keep up with it. So this is now going to be a general sticky that will be replaced "every so often" when the previous thread gets overly full :)

    Novels, nonfiction, ebooks, audiobooks, graphic novels, etc - everything counts!

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    What are you reading? (August 2023)

    Hey Beehaw (and friends)! What're you reading?

    Novels, nonfiction, ebooks, audiobooks, graphic novels, etc - everything counts!

    61
    Chuck Tingle Goes Mainstream...ish
    themillions.com Chuck Tingle Goes Mainstream...ish

    Perhaps the most surprising thing about prolific queer erotica author Chuck Tingle—who, talking via Zoom, wears a bubblegum pink bag over...

    Chuck Tingle Goes Mainstream...ish

    cross-posted from: https://kbin.social/m/books/t/223208

    > Perhaps the most surprising thing about prolific queer erotica author Chuck Tingle—who, talking via Zoom, wears a bubblegum pink bag over...

    0
    What are you reading? (July 2023)

    Hey Beehaw (and others)! Whatcha reading?

    3
    Announcing Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure
  • If you're into gw2 specifically, there seem to be 3 communities (two active and one basically dead I think) in the fediverse -

    !guildwars2@kbin.social

    !guildwars2@lemmy.wtf

    !guildwars2@lemmy.ml

  • Announcing Guild Wars 2: Secrets of the Obscure
  • Are they buffing base skyscale movement speed? Because that's the use case for the raptor, it's faster than skyscale over flat surfaces.

    Only use my springer gets nowadays is when a boss has a CC bar to break at the start of a fight, eg matriarch.

  • Fresh bread! [Recipe inside]

    [Image decription: A round, light-reddish-brown loaf of bread on a wire cooling rack. There is a split down the center of the bread where it expanded in the oven while baking, called an "ear". The top of the bread is lightly dusted with flour except in the split area.]

    I started learning to bake about a year ago with bread. Lately I've mostly been making cookies and recently been learning to make pie, but I felt an itch to come back to the basics.

    Recipe:

    • 400g bread flour
    • 260g warm water (65%)
    • 2g instant or active dry yeast (about 1 teaspoon) (0.5%)
    • 8g salt (2%)

    This bread was made with a poolish, not sourdough starter. A poolish is a preferment, and gives you a flavor similar to sourdough without the need to care for a sourdough starter. Poolish is the traditional way to make french baguettes, so if you know that flavor you know what to expect from a poolish.

    Make the poolish:

    • Mix 200g flour, 200g water, and a pinch of yeast (seriously, a tiny amount). Cover and let stand at room temperature for 12 hours. After this time the poolish should be bubbly and smell nice and yeasty, maybe slightly alcoholic.

    Make the dough:

    • Pour the remaining 60g of water into the poolish and mix to loosen it up. Then add the remaining 200g flour and mix thoroughly to combine. Let sit for 20 minutes to autolyse - this hydrates the flour and makes it stronger.

    • Add in the yeast and salt and mix to combine. At this stage it's easiest to mix with wet hands in a pinching motion to combine in the salt and yeast.

    • Optionally, knead for about 5 minutes by hand or about 3-4 minutes by stand mixer with a bread hook attachment. If kneading by hand, be sure to have a dough scraper handy, it will be sticky. You can skip this step entirely. Kneading will make it rise better in the oven, if you skip it may be a flatter loaf.

    • Cover and let the dough stand in a bowl for 15 minutes, then stretch and fold it. Repeat, including the wait time, until you've stretch/folded 4 times total.

    • Cover the dough and refrigerate for around 24 hours or up to a few days.

    • About 1 hour before you plan to bake, take the dough out and shape it into a taut ball. Then put it seam side down into either a proofing basket or a mixing bowl lined with a well-floured kitchen towel. Cover with a damp towel and let rise. The dough should grow around 50-66% in size. When you firmly poke it with a damp finger, the spot you poke should bounce back slightly but still leave an indent.

    • Preheat the oven to 450 degrees. Place a dutch oven or heavy lidded pot in the oven to preheat it as well.

    • Flip the dough onto parchment paper and slash it on top with a razor blade or a serrated bread knife to give it a weak spot to expand while baking.

    • Bake in the dutch oven, lid on, for 30 minutes. Then remove the lid and bake at least another 15 minutes, or longer if you want a darker crust.

    • Let cool for at least an hour before slicing - this is actually important, the inside of your loaf needs to finish baking from the residual heat when you pull it out! If you slice early it will wind up gummy

    • Enjoy!

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    PSA: Image posts and blind accessibility.

    With the recent news that the r/blind community has migrated to a lemmy instance, I thought now would be a good time to post a quick PSA on image descriptions.

    Blind and low vision computer users often rely on screen readers to navigate their computers and the internet. These tools work great on text-based platforms (when the backend is coded correctly to make buttons and UI elements visible to the screen reader), but they struggle a lot with images. OCR and image recognition have come a long way, but they're still not reliable.

    On Lemmy, there's no way (yet) to add alt text to image posts, but one thing that we sighted folk can do to make the website a more accessible place for the blind/low vision community is to describe the contents of the image in text, so screen readers (or braille displays) can interpret the text for the user. This doesn't need to be anything fancy - you can see an example of me doing so in this post here - simply indicate somewhere that you are describing the contents of the image, and then do so in text. If you're transcribing text, it's best to do so as exact to the text in the image as you can (including spelling errors!). If you're describing something visual, it's best to keep it about the length of a tweet, but be as detailed as you need to be to give context to what you write about in the post.

    If you'd like a more detailed guide on how to best do image descriptions and alt text, here's a site that describes more specifics - https://www.perkins.org/resource/how-write-alt-text-and-image-descriptions-visually-impaired/

    Edit: You are able to add alt text to embedded images, as noted by @sal@mander.xyz here. This would only work for images within the text of your comment, not for image posts (topics which link to images).

    Edit 2: @retronautickz@beehaw.org wrote a post on kbin on best practices in writing image descriptions and alt text.

    0
    Lauren of the channel Living Well With Schizophrenia is currently going through psychosis and has been educating about/normalizing the experience and treatment.

    10 days ago, Lauren (who has schizoaffective disorder) shared that she was starting to experience psychosis, and as an educational channel about schizophrenia and related conditions such as schizoaffective disorder she has been sharing the experience of coming to terms with this and receiving treatment.

    Her next update was a week later, sharing that she'd voluntarily checked in to a psychiatric ward, and then today she uploaded a day in the life at a psych ward. She seems to be doing well, but still has no solidified discharge date quite yet.

    I think these sorts of videos are very important to normalize and destigmatize seeking treatment for more stigmatized conditions such as schizophrenia. Society has come a long way in destigmatizing anxiety and depression, but still has a long way to go with anything to do with psychosis, so I thought these were worth a share.

    0
    The Virtue of Owning Books You Haven’t Read: Why Umberto Eco Kept an “Antilibrary”

    > [...] Eco separated his visitors into two categories: “those who react with ‘Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have. How many of these books have you read’ and the others — a very small minority — who get the point is that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendages but a research tool.”

    0
    Why Libraries are Awesome

    So I'm a big advocate of utilizing your local public libraries. The best way to secure more funding for them is to use their services! So I thought real quick that I should write up a quick posts about the services that many libraries offer nowadays that you may not know about. Some of these points may be applicable mostly to America and Canada, but it's worth checking in with your libraries in other parts of the world to see if you have similar services available! And definitely post here if you have more to add.

    Membership

    One point I'd like to start off with is that, even if your local library system is smaller and doesn't offer the services you'd like (or have the books you'd like), check in with the nearest major cities! In many places in the USA, libraries don't require that you reside in the city the library is in, only the same state. For example, I don't live in the city of Los Angeles, but I have a Los Angeles Public Library card because I live in the state of California and that's all they require. Many times you have to get to the city to pick up the card in person, though, so plan on this the next time you're in the area.

    Books

    Of course, the first thing you'll think of at a library are "books." But did you know:

    • Many libraries have suspended their fees for overdue books, due to the administration of the fee system costing more than they collect.

    • Libby is a service many libraries offer that have ebook and audiobook checkout. If you have a Kindle or Kobo device you may also be able to read your ebooks on there instead of on your phone or tablet as well. Your books will automatically return themselves at the end of their loan period, so you don't have to worry about fees if your library still has those. Libby has a limited number of copies for each book, so you may need to wait for your book to become available.

    • Hoopla is a similar service to Libby in that it has ebooks and audiobooks, but it also has comics, tv shows, and movies as well. And with Hoopla, your library has an unlimited number of copies, so there's no wait time! Instead, you have a limited number of items you can chekc out per month.

    Movies

    For movies, you might think of only DVD rentals. However, many libaries also offer streaming servies!

    • Kanopy is a streaming service that offers high-quality movies such as the criterion collection, oscar nominees/winners, etc. You have a limited number of watches per month, set by your library.

    • Hoopla, as mentioned above, also offers TV and Movies for streaming. They also have binge passes, which give you temporary access to the catalog of some major paid streaming libraries such as CuriosityStream and **

    • My library offers these services but I haven't used them yet so I can't comment on the usage experience: Digitalia Film, which focuses on foreign language films and classic American cinema, and medici.tv which focuses on classical music including videos of concerts, ballets, operas, etc.

    Music

    Of course you may be able to check out CDs, but your library might also offer:

    • Freegal, a service that allows you to download 5 DRM-free mp3 tracks per week from the Sony Music catalog.

    • Hoopla also offers streaming music!

    Video Games

    via @any1th3r3 - Your local library may also offer video game loans!

    News

    Many libraries give you free access to paywalled news media, such as the New York Times Digital, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, etc.

    Online Learning

    Your library may also offer free access to some online learning websites such as LinkedIn Learning, Craftsy, Mango Languages, and more!

    Makerspaces

    Many library systems will offer makerspaces with access to 3d printers, laser cutters, specialty printers, sewing machines, photo studios, and sometimes even CNC mills! Of course the tools offered in these spaces are highly depending on the individual library system.

    Seed Banks

    Fairly self explanatory, some libraries have seed banks so you can start your own garden!

    Tool library

    Some libraries also let you check out tools such as power drills, circular saws, sewing machines, etc.

    Passes

    And last on my list, libraries often will offer passes to museums, zoos, and other local activities in your area.

    -----

    Please utilize your libraries!

    Finally, I'd like to end off by repeating what I said at the start: The best way to secure more funding for your library is to utilize your library. Libraries are one of the few spaces left where you can go and are not expected to exchange money for their services. They bring equity to many underserved communities and it is vitally important to preserve them. A lot of people I know think that they want to avoid using the library because they don't want to "take away the resources from those who need it more," but in reality it's the exact opposite! The more you want others to be able to use a library, the more you should use it yourself as well!

    0
    Any poetry fans in these parts who might recommend some poets or poetry anthologies?
  • Margaret Atwood’s Dearly helped me through a time of grief.

    Danez Smith’s Don’t Call Us Dead is a collection that deals with police violence against black people, and about AIDS in the queer community. One poem in it made me instantly cry.

  • Kamirose Kamirose @beehaw.org

    BookWyrm: @Kamirose@bookwyrm.social Mastodon: @Kamirose@dftba.club

    Avatar by @heyheymomo@socel.net

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