serakit

I love country music. I love it deeply and ferociously. I'm also very, very aware of its cultural problems, and so periodically I go look at one of the major country news sites to find out about all the songs that are critical darlings and will never, ever get radio airplay because they're trying to change the culture of country. I've found some lovely songs this way. (Also some utterly heartwrenching ones; if you want to hear a stunning country take on being a rape survivor, go check out Lindsay Ell's "Make You".)

Which is how I came across a song released in early November called "The Problem," sung by Amanda Shires and Jason Isbell, which strikes me as being very much in the same tradition as Reba McEntire's "She Thinks His Name Was John".

Both songs strive to draw attention to a topic your many if not most country music fans would really much rather victim-blame about, and they both do it somewhat obliquely without ever outright mentioning what they're talking about, in such a way that if you're not living in that moment you might not know what they're talking about-- I guessed fairly quickly that "The Problem" was about abortion, but I didn't know "She Thinks His Name Was John" was about AIDS until I went looking for the lyrics and found articles about how historic it was. (By the time I was old enough to notice, AIDS was well on its way to being under control in the US.)

We're actually in a really wonderful cultural moment for country songs starting to explicitly call out country culture-- Keith Urban's "Female" may have gotten dragged by progressives outside the country community, but a lot of people on the inside were well aware of the importance of a major A-list star publicly identifying as feminist. (From my perspective, the important thing about that song was that something explicitly referencing the idea of "she asked for it" being wrong went on to get actually played on the radio.) And the lovely-but-no-radio songs are more accessible than ever because of the internet-- note that I'm finding all these songs from one fairly mainstream country news site which is also talking about the gender gap in radio time. Relatively recent songs: "Black Like Me" and "What Are You Gonna Tell Her" by Mickey Guyton (and I could enthuse for SO LONG about "What Are You Gonna Tell Her"; she's addressing the issue of growing up told you can do anything and then hitting the world and discovering sexism exists), "The Daughters" by Little Big Town, "Get It Girl, You Go" by Laura Bundy (which is a very *weird* song), and the entire Highwomen album.

On a related note, while not a callout of country culture per se, country music is also now in the sort of place where a song like "To Break Hers"-- which is about the fallout of finally admitting you're gay after years of long-term relationship with a woman-- can exist at *all*. (I like it because it manages to thread the needle of "everyone involved in this has a good reason to be upset" while still making it clear that being gay is not, in fact, the problem here; having a serious relationship based on a lie is.)

I have returned to my attempts to actually *use* my cookbooks! (If you're just joining us now, I have more than a hundred cookbooks, many of which were acquired secondhand and chosen on a basis of "interesting" and "eye-catching" rather than anything as pedestrian as "useful.") I did not, however, wind up using a book I haven't used before, but rather two old favorites.

Since I have made all the brownie recipes except the blondies in The Ghirardelli Chocolate Cookbook at least once, I know I've made chocolate fudgy brownies before-- though last time I was making brownies from here, we still didn't know what-all my dietary restrictions actually were and I was making them vegan with applesauce, which is turns out to be exactly the wrong way to do it once you know what I actually have. This time I did it properly following the recipe. It's the first time in a while that I've done anything that involves melting down chocolate chips rather than using cocoa powder, and it's a lot easier than I remember it being. I need to remember that many of my early experiences with this cookbook were made much harder because I was dealing with pretty serious untreated (and for a while undiagnosed) mental and physical illness, a highly stressful life, and not a ton of experience with cooking. Doing it now that I have experience with things like making every banana bread variation recipe in the same loaf just because we can (which is delicious but such an intense flavor that you can have, like, a bite of it), this recipe is actually very simple, very quick, and very good, though next time I am definitely lining my pan with parchment paper.

Maybe next time I pick up this cookbook I'll try something not in the brownie section. I've made all the brownies, but nothing not a brownie.

Today, while looking through How To Bake Everything, I spotted a recipe for Sweet Potato Galette, which I attempted. The main problem with it is that the amount of filling called for and the amount of crust called for don't match, so it came out somewhat undercooked in the middle and then burned on top. Other than that it's quite tasty and there are a *lot* of galette recipes in there, some of which look pretty good, so I think I'm just going to spend my winter making various varieties of galette.

Also however clumsy it was I MADE A GALETTE AND I'M VERY PROUD OF THIS.

I really should try one of the cookbooks I haven't used before, though.

I have come into the possession of a frozen farm share chicken that is defrosting in the fridge.

Anyone have a good crock pot recipe for a whole chicken?

Apparently the paperback version of We're the Weird Aliens came together faster than expected; you can now order it here.

This means plenty of time for holiday shopping to beat the expected paperback shortage!

I'm finally reading Waking Up White. It is already better than White Fragility and I'm only a couple of chapters in, but I was expecting that. I'm going to do a proper post on it later, once I've finished it, something which is taking a while because they're short chapters and at the end of each chapter there are self-reflection questions intended to get you to think about your preconceptions. (And the way she approaches this is so much more likely to get people to actually listen!)

However, I did discover something interesting in the bit at the beginning that addresses the "but it's REALLY about class" people, because Debby Irving grew up a country club girl. My immediately family never belonged to any country clubs, but I had cousins who did.

Jewish country clubs.

And the attitudes of Jewish country club people seem to be somewhat different from the attitudes of Yankee WASP country club people, quite aside from there being something I can't quite identify in her descriptions of her early life that makes me want to offer catlike hiss at the culture she's describing, as I realize that my usual disparaging eyeroll at "country club people" is very specifically directed at the kind of country clubs where you wear salmon shorts and play polo. (Which is also how country clubs usually intrude on my consciousness, as that's how they appear in media, while my experience of the Jewish ones is primarily attending other people's bar mitzvahs.) I don't have the same instinctive mental hiss at the Jewish ones.

The more racial-awareness stuff I read the more I become aware that a fair bit of Jewish culture penetrated through despite my mother's efforts to separate me from it. (Heightened, I think, by growing up in a very Jewish area, such that there are a lot of things that are actually Jewish outlooks that I perceive as "just how the world works." Right up until I'm out of the local area, anyway...)

I haven't watched it yet, but Lindsay Ellis has another video up about getting a cease and desist letter accusing her of defamation from the omegaverse lawsuit people because of the last video, and other events subsequent to that.

(Because these people apparently don't know how to quit while they're behind...)

Grocery shopping is horrendously overwhelming and I hate it. At some point I do need to manage to make it inside a TraderJoe's, though, for the very simple reason that I need pumpkin butter-- every year I get a jar of pumpkin butter at Halloween which I stick on a shelf until Purim, whereupon I use it for hamantaschen. I refuse to let the pandemic steal my hamantaschen.

I did not, however, do that *today*, because unlike most grocery stores, Trader Joe's is doing the "line up outside so we can limit customers" thing and the line at the one I was near was *really long*. I might try combining it with the "get up early to go vote while everyone else is at work" errand, which is the other thing I didn't do today because the line was really long. There are two more weeks of early voting plus actual election day; I can do it sometime that *isn't* the first day of early voting and therefore incredibly crowded. Especially since my work schedule is irregular which means I can do it when everyone else is at work.

(The bright spots of the day were sitting around a fire in benign_cremator's yard and finding cranberries while on the terrible grocery shopping trip. It is, at last, the season. I shall make cobbler later, and torte, and potentially sugared cranberries although those are more fun when you soak them in alcohol first.)

An observation on the cold weather: my body appears to have shifted into "STARVING! ALL! THE! TIME!" mode.

There is an attitude towards life in a lot of YA fiction that I absolutely detest: the idea that being angry is always unjustified and being nice involves letting people walk all over you.

Oh, not fighting evil. YA will let you rage against outright evil all day. Go kill the dragon, fight the wicked king, discover that no, really, you *can't* redeem that bad guy. The problem lies in closer relationships. Friends. Family. Every time I try to read a YA novel, especially a contemporary one, I run into situations where protagonist's family or friends are terrible to the protagonist in a more mundane way-- constant belittling of her hobbies, or breaking her stuff, or ignoring her interests, and the book very clearly takes the side of the family, insisting that being upset about their constant boundary violations is the real problem here. It's always set up so she learns a "lesson" about being more accepting of other people, or "people are more important than disagreements," or your family breaking your prized guitar isn't something you should hold a grudge over because "people are more important than things."

I have never been especially inclined to any sort of YA other than the epic hero fantasy stories where there's barely a romance-- and truly, not even very many of them-- and I wonder if this being *incredibly* common is part of why.  Especially given that I adore Claire Kann's YA romances, where the primary theme is "let's think about what boundaries mean"... and where I frequently have to pause and remind myself that this is Claire Kann so this thing where people are hitting the protagonist's boundaries is going to be resolved in a way that acknowledges those boundaries are fine. Good, even.

But we really do need to start thinking, when we analyze a story, about more than just "does it have any obvious sexism or prejudices", because honestly I find the implicit message that having boundaries is a bad thing to be far more damaging.

And I don't like the world twisting to make the protagonist wrong, as in this current one I'm reading. It's differently angled from the usual "guy is a jerk except he lets *only you* see his deeply wounded core!" stories because there are strong hints guy is only a jerk to the protagonist and not generally a jerk to everyone, but that's still not... *good*.

(Also someday I really want a story where the "secretly we are pen pals and don't know it" trope is *not* infused with extra melodrama about their real identities hating each other. It is *possible* to pull that off well, but most writers are not Sherwood Smith. Can I have one where they're just kind of generally in each other's social circles but not close?)

I think I need to recalibrate what I want to read. I've now had several instances of looking at a book's summary and thinking "That sounds really interesting; I want to read it!" and then actually starting and going "No, no, DO NOT WANT".

It's important to note this isn't an instance of bad marketing copy; they're usually exactly what they claim they are-- it's just I have this self-perception that I really want to read Difficult Works With Heavy Abuse Underpinnings and every time I actually *try* to do so they're well-written, engaging, and horribly, horribly triggering such that I can't get more than a couple of chapters in.

This has now happened enough times that I think I need to stop and really interrogate whether I think I'm going to *like* a book before adding it to my list. And also think really hard about what causes me to like a book. (The book in question in this instance is "Still Missing" by Chevy Stevens, which I think Jessica Jones fans will really enjoy, as the villain appears to be basically Kilgrave without the superpowers.)

Wizards of the Coast did a THING again. Once again to do with prices, and the community is united in outrage but it's still going to sell.

The product is a new Secret Lair (remember Secret Lairs are individual or small groups of cards available for a limited time directly from Wizards): a Walking Dead crossover. Which seems kinda weird on the face of it, because Walking Dead's cultural moment has passed and while it's still popular it's not OVERTAKING SOCIETY anymore. I wonder if this is product placement or licensing-- did Wizards get paid to do this branding or are they paying to do this branding.

Now, the "another company's IP" part of this is annoying but not *inherently* problematic-- no one cared that much about the Godzilla alternate art skins they did for Ikoria. The problem here is that these cards are mechanically unique one-offs, not reskins of existing cards, and they are black-border.

I will pause for a moment here to explain the difference between black and silver borders. In the beginning, there was the black border, which meant it was a card from what was then called an "expert" set-- one that was all originals. Then there was the white border, used for Core Sets and other sets that were just reprints. They then retired the white border and just printed everything in black-border, which is now slang for "tournament legal" even though developments in card printing led to special edition borderless cards which were also tournament legal. Much later, there came the silver border, which was used for what are called the "Un-sets": joke Magic sets which do ridiculous things and are sometimes used by R&D to experiment with more out-there mechanics they might want to bring to black border someday. Silver-bordered cards are not tournament legal, in any format; they are for casual play at home only.

Promotional cards are also sometimes done in silver border. There was a My Little Pony charity collaboration that was very cute and well-liked. Silver-border cards can be silly and tailored to the crossover IP in a way black-border cards can't. The Godzilla collaboration was black-border, but they were just reskins of cards that were also in the accompanying (monster-themed) set, and they came with notations about how the Godzilla cards were, for the purposes of deck construction rules, considered the same card as the equivalent Magic card. (For Constructed play, you can only have four of any named card that isn't a basic land.)

The problem here is that these cards are *both* original, non-reskinned cards, *and* in black border. There's no way to get them in a set; there's no other way to get them except for this two-week period where they're on sale. They won't be printed until after the ordering period is done, which means there's no way of knowing of one of them is going to become a tournament staple until it's too late to get more-- which means your choice is "buy now" or "wait until it becomes horrifically expensive later but you need four copies of it to be competitive."

(There are also countries where you can't get them at *all*; Secret Lair is not available worldwide.)

They've done things like this before, and they've been massively problematic. Not two weeks before this announcement, Wizards announced that they were no longer going to include mechanically unique cards as the buy-a-box promotional cards because of negative player feedback-- they'd caused problems by completely taking over entire tournament scenes to the point where no one wanted to play, and meanwhile gotten so expensive that even if you wanted to be competitive you couldn't actually get your hands on a copy.

But those were at least still attached to *sets*. Back in the early days of Magic, there were the cards Nalanthi Dragon and Mana Crypt. Mana Crypt was a promotion for the Magic novels; you sent away a coupon in the book for the free card. It turned into one of the most sought-after and powerful cards, was hideously expensive, and took them a decade to reprint. By comparison, Nalanthi Dragon wasn't that exciting. It was a DragonCon promo card. It wasn't very good. But people were outraged because it was a collectible that only a certain subset of people had the opportunity to buy. People were so outraged, in fact, that Wizards included it as a "send away for" in Duellist magazine so people could get it even if they hadn't been at DragonCon, and swore to the community that NEVER AGAIN would they print new cards outside of a set.

This promise was sort of *bent* with the box topper-- which, again, *still* caused the same problems, and they announced they'd learned their lesson. Clearly this was an outright lie, because here they are again doing the thing they've long promised never do again, that has always, universally caused major problems.

In fact, the *only* promise to their players they seem bent on keeping is the Reserve List, and *that* one is one everybody would be much happier to see gone. But they insist they can't do that because they made a promise to their players. Not only that, but they're functionally printing these new cards directly to the Reserve List: it uses someone else's IP; it's almost certainly a one-time deal that they can't reprint no matter how essential or expensive it gets. They insist that they can reprint mechanically identical "Magic versions" of these cards-- but unless you change the rules, then you have the same card with two names and it becomes something you can have eight of in your deck. They also, while repeatedly insisting they *can* reprint this if necessary, refuse to commit to actually doing so. (And, historically, have refused to reprint things no matter how necessary they were; it took 11 years to reprint Mana Crypt.)

And that's just the main and major issue with this! There's also the issue of bypassing local game stores which rely on selling Magic for revenue-- and since the way people become enfranchised players is often the community at their local game store, this is being taken as another sign that Magic wants to cash out on their way to ending the physical cards altogether and just having Arena.

There's also some thematic issues, which are more subjective: Walking Dead is *very* not-child-appropriate yet here it is being introduced into a game in part aimed at children. We are putting a character who is known for being a rapist on a Magic card (though I do agree with the people who are suggesting *that* outrage is more performative than anything, since most of the people shouting about it have nothing to say about the horrendous amount of *actual* rape and sexual assault and driving out of women common in the broader Magic community). Wizards insists that we are never going to get a world any more steampunk than Kaladesh and never ever have anything gun-based or technology based because this is a FANTASY game, not a science fiction one... and yet is introducing a heavily gun-based franchise as a main card rather than alternate art. I'm not going to get into a lot of detail about those because, well, this is already really long.

I'll just note that one of the next sets is stated to be a magic school called Strixhaven that seems very Harry Potter, and given this new penchant for tie-ins there's probably a Harry Potter one already in the works that they're going to try to sell on the grounds they couldn't get out of it when Rowling went on her rant, and it is going to once again explode in their faces.

I still like playing the game, but I'm getting less and less interested in anything other than the cards-- I'm not following the competitive scene, I'm not really making an effort to be part of the community, I'm barely reading the story even though it's online now, I'm reluctant to open the Wizards announcements because they're always awful. And I don't think I'm the only one; I've been noticing a lot of the major podcasters get steadily disheartened and less and less enthusiastic about what they're doing.