Sidetracks - February 3, 2022

[helloladies]

Sidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share with each other. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag. For more links and commentary you can follow us on Twitter. You can also support us on Patreon.

Anna

1. I love to bake but I’ve been struggling with wrist pain for the last couple of months so I was happy to see this article about baking with chronic hand pain. Sadly this seems like an issue a lot of folks have so I thought I would pass this along.

2. Someone made a programming language using classical Chinese!

KJ

3. "Your Bubble is not the Culture" by Yair Rosenberg, a writer for The Atlantic, looks at the disconnect between critics and the culture they cover. It's a good reminder that not everyone is Extremely Online, and of how being so can color one's worldview.

4. In January, New York magazine published a long interview with Joss Whedon. It's an interesting read, but I'm more interested in sharing Gita Jackson's reaction, where she discusses Whedon's (dubious at best) history with actors and characters of color and the interview's framing of Ray Fisher's charges of racist behavior on the set of Justice League. I also recommend Jackson's critical overview of Whedon's rise and fall and his influence on the culture, for good and ill.

5. Who else has gotten into Wordle? If you missed it somehow, it's a daily word game where you get six chances to guess a five-letter word. There are two things I particularly like about it: it's a bite-sized game, only one word per day, so it's never going to be a time sink, and everyone gets the same word, so it's a communal experience as well as an individual accomplishment. NPR's Linda Holmes talks about the phenomenon and the different approaches people take to playing. (Update: Written before the New York Times bought the game. Time will tell how (not if) this change in ownership will change the community that's grown up around it.)

6. "Line Goes Up" is a very long but incredibly informative video essay (although really at over two hours should we start calling them documentaries now?) about crypto and NFTs. I came out with a much better understanding of how these systems work and all the problems with them. Worth the time investment if you can make it.

Renay

7. Hank Green did a breakdown on TikTok's creator fund. It's...bad.