(no subject)

History books don't often tell things very interesting. It's like, half a page of this king, half a page of next king, half a page of bishops and saints and suchlike. How people actually lived and what kind of deals they made and how their society was organised? Not in these books so far. So I'm bored. It's like a king list but with more judgey descriptions of the dudes that didn't make it into the list.

I know the sort of thing I'm looking for exists, I just need to find the right books.
And possibly a different bit of history with more surviving evidence.

Also the books I've got at the moment persist in describing Anglo Saxon inheritance as a series of constantly broken primogeniture inheritances, instead of maybe possibly a system that didn't just go to the firstborn son in the first place so all the zig zag around the family trees is just how things worked. I mean, if it very seldom does the thing, maybe it's not trying.

And even histories about Queens are being annoying about women. Like, it's using how many children a couple had as evidence of how close they were and how much sex they had? Pretty sure there's too many variables in there to use it that way. Also the stupid book just used the fact that one queen had a baby every year to say that they were not political and totally taken up by baby making. And this is written by a woman. I'm pretty sure pregnant women still have brains and talkings and so forth! Also also it's being pretty stupid about the role of religious communities and being logically inconsistent. Like, bishops and abbesses keep on being important to the story, but every time an ex-queen goes away to be a nun and becomes an abbess the book says they're being pushed out of power. They're being pushed out of the line of inheritance, maybe, but they're in a position to wield a different sort of power.

I'm just really frustrated at how the distant past is being written about as if it's a sort of defective inconsistent version of one particularly sexist interpretation of ... one slice of the medium past. Pretty sure it didn't work that way. I mean, the fifth century isn't going to know it's being rubbish at being the fifteenth century.

Boo. Need more and better books.

(no subject)

Have now rewatched all but one episode from last season of Doctor Who.
I still hate the one where he says to not give a little girl her meds. I know what the message was supposed to be, about listening to little kids, but what they actually did was have the Doctor tell kids not to take their meds. That's actual evil and I can't be having with it at all.
Also they reached new depths of departure from teh whole 'science' idea, and I say that having watched Classic stories.
But it had some nice lines, and that bit at the end "One person is more amazing, harder to understand, but more amazing than universes." I liked that.

So on rewatch I'm not all wound up and fed up of it, I'm just kind of nothingy. Which is, like, progress.

Also Missy is a delight as long as I can ignore the heavily gendered aspects of her. I mean, I know the Master goes all in when he goes into a persona, so Missy of course would play with the new possibilities, but that... that's just an excuse for this particular set of tropes being used by writers who think that 'suddenly feminine' necessarily means concerned with sexy and kissing.
... I cannot ignore the gendered stuff. But Missy is concurrently fun.

The race and gender stuff is still there, but knowing exactly what it does, I'm better at filtering it out.

I just would rather not have to filter so much of my favourite shows.