Author: elenloth

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Books of 2026: There is no antimemetics division

This year or late last, I read “There is no antimemetics division” by qntm. This is a delightfully bizarre story based on stories from the SCP wiki. I would like to read more novel-form-factor SCP stories.

It bears a certain similarity to Ruin, and I’ll say no more about that.

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Books of 2026: Spinning Silver

I’m just trying to write down the books I’ve been reading this year.

In January, I read Spinning Silver, by Naomi Novik. I’m not Lithuanian, and I’m not Jewish, and I’m not as plugged in to my Eastern European heritage as I’d like to be…but this book felt like home. It’s hard to explain why.

The first time I read it, I was sad that Miriam/Wanda was not the ship.

The second time I read it, I was okay with how it turned out.

I would like to try krupnik. Apparently we call it boilo here?

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Splaining

Today at the Sakura Matsuri, I had an extremely amusing moment. Well, amusing to me, anyway.

We were at a booth that sold toy swords (either plastic or wall hangers – not sure which), and two young men (I would estimate early 20s) were there looking at the swords. I overheard one of them telling the other “This is called a katana. It’s what they used…” (I don’t remember the rest of the sentence). The second young man said “So is that what you would use in martial arts, then? Like to practice?”

The first young man floundered a bit, so naturally I decided to insert myself into their conversation and info dump a bit.

“Well, that depends on the martial art. For kendo, they use a sword made of bamboo slats, so you can hit each other without hurting too much. For iaido, they use a sword made of an aluminum zinc alloy, so it’s lightweight but not sharp. For batto-do or other cutting arts, they use a real sword made of steel. There are probably demos of that today or tomorrow!”

Young man #2 said “wow, you really know your stuff!” And I said “Yep!” and wandered off.

This is an example of how Not To Human. In general, this kind of behavior is not considered polite or appropriate. But I think in the specific context I was in, it was okay.

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The two conservatisms

My hot take for today is that fiscal conservatism is incompatible with social conservatism. It’s expensive to police people that hard.

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Chronic Illness

This is an *excellent* column from the Washington Post about chronic illness, how we measure it, and where it originates. 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2026/03/19/chronic-diseases-health-policy/

“Blame is cheap. System change costs money and effort.” 

Here is a gift link to the article.

Disease is not caused by immorality. Thinking that way is tempting, because of the Just World Fallacy and Fundamental Attribution Error; but it’s not a sound way to go about interacting with the world.

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Throw back the dead man’s coin

I just shared my bitter brew post with a new person, and it reminded me of this amazing Wondermark comic.

https://wondermark.com/c/1135/

Because yes. If we did want equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome, we would not have inheritance.

For that matter, we couldn’t even let children be raised by their parents! Even aside from the money issue (already solved in our Glorious Meritocratic Utopia), parents are of varying quality. My parents gave me unconditional love and support (even though we’ve had our arguments), while other parents are abusive.

So we would need a robotic state crèche for all the children to grow up in, to make sure their Equality of Opportunity Not of Outcome stays equal.

Do you hear how absurd that sounds? Do you WANT to end up in Harrison Bergeron? Or in Anthem? (As a side note, I read those two stories around the same time in high school, and woweee did I not realize the authors were very different until adulthood. Still the only Rand book I’ve read.)

Anyway. “Equality of Opportunity” is an impossibility. The best we can do is to stay mindful of the inequalities that do pop up, and try our best to mitigate them. It won’t be perfect but we can do our best.