Notes

Kieron Gillen is one of my favorite comic book writers and The Power Fantasy is him operating at top form. Using the metaphor of super powered humans, this story handles familiar territory such as conflict and escalation, but also touches on grief, ideology, and change.

Personally, of course, Menon wore ‘just a loin-cloth’ in the afternoons, because as a man it was still permissible to do this. Yet for females the rules had been modified. Menon grew up with bare-breasted women, but with exposure to the wider world, he too came to frown upon that old tradition. He had absorbed (and was now endorsing) an external gaze in which women’s bodies necessarily needed covering up. To not do so became ‘abnormal’—or to channel the scholars referred to earlier, it was no longer ‘proper’. Which is fine, given that sensibilities change over time in every culture. Trouble arises, however, when we project a modern dynamic into the past to trigger unhistorical outrage and a well-meaning but misplaced indignation.

A note on the delimitation bill

The genuinely serious objections to these bills are structural and are barely being discussed. We are redrawing India’s constituency map using 2011 census data, eighteen years old by the time elections are held under it in 2029. Worse, Parliament has now given itself the power to decide by simple majority when any future delimitation occurs and which census it uses. There is no automatic constitutional trigger anymore. Every future government can time it to its own electoral advantage. The delimitation being carried out today could govern Indian elections for three decades, based on data that was already stale when the exercise began. Will this nullify any electoral advances possible through the realization of a caste census, which some states are considering or have considered?

Alongside a fascinating piece of history lost to time is this little nugget:

Pass through the doorway and you'll finally come face to face with a grave covered with a Persian rug, decorated with a giant AI rendering of a Mughal Princess.

A story about someone lost to time and erased by history, only to be revived and rendered by the approximation of a model. Conquistadors or Claude, the oppressor always erases memory.

The roguelike structure is load-bearing for the story in a way I hadn't seen done before. Zagreus dies constantly — that's the mechanic — and the narrative is built around the repetition rather than against it. Each run reveals a new fragment of relationship or backstory. Death is progress.

Supergiant figured out how to make a game about failure feel like a game about persistence. The writing is sharp throughout and the voice cast commits fully. One of the few games I finished and immediately wanted to start again.

Villeneuve's adaptation earns its scale. The film is patient in a way blockbusters rarely allow themselves to be — it trusts that the strangeness of Arrakis will register if given space to breathe. Hans Zimmer's score is doing a lot of work here and deserves more credit than it gets.

The second film is better, but this one does the necessary and unfashionable work of world-building without apology.

Martyr! is familiar and totally alien, an articulated empathy of what it feels like to be of this place and that, and of rediscovering what it means to be of the homeland. Kaveh Akbar brings characters that are real and instantly recognizable, and puts them in uncanny landscapes that seem alien while they shouldn't be.

A short piece that reframes design systems as a social and organizational artifact first, a technical one second. The components are easy; the conventions, shared language, and trust between teams are hard. Kholmatova is good at naming things that practitioners know but rarely say out loud.

The point about governance being the most important and most neglected part of a design system has aged well. Most failed design systems I've seen failed because of people problems, not technology.

Chana Porter's novella is a beautiful reflection on memory, form, permanence, and loss. "Tips for Attending a Dinner Party When Your World Has Ended and Another World Is Just Beginning" also might be one of the most heart warming openings to a book I've read in a while.

When I think about this book, I think about my dogs and all the people I've lost in life, and how their memory isn't just their passing but all the moments that led up to it.

Body horror meets the male gaze.

Monkey Man expertly blended mythology, fascism, gender, and class struggle and deserved a lot more flowers. Zakir Hussain's cameo in the second act is perfect, a nod to classic Bollywood. Dev Patel in this (as in the Green Knight a few years ago) shines as an actor.

The streaming era has been terrible for television in many ways. However, a show like The Curse wouldn't exist in any other era. A consistent background hum of discomfort highlights this part-parody, part-reflection of HGTV-esque reality, with scattershot yet brilliant critiques of gentrification, white savior complex, the camera gaze, and so much more.