Snakebite

 Listen, admit it: You want to read someone else's homework. I get it. You're super curious about the history of tikka masala. Well, bruh, today is your SECOND luckiest day.  This is just another of my academic articles. I'm pretty proud of it, to be honest. The footnotes are broken; sorry about that. I had some good jokes in them, too. You are missing out gems like: Aheheh. Ahem. Anyhow:  The Material World of Tikka Masala Empire is one of the oldest forms of human polity. Almost immediately after humans first settled into agricultural societies, the first empires were born; transient little glories built on bronze, stone, and blood. Humanity seemed to have a taste for empire and refined the concept, one generation after another. By the 1800s the great spider of the British Empire managed to cast nearly the whole of the world under the shadow of its web; great strands carried steamships and railcars to the dustiest edges of humanity. Traditional historiography tells of t...

RPGs are intensely personal, which is odd when you remember they're done as a group activity. I guess they have that in common with sex. I'd rather not extend that metaphor further, though.  What matters about that is that it's often hard to remember how different people's tastes are, and that difference can power disagreements. You can really only productively disagree with someone who has fairly similar tastes/values/beliefs/etc as you. The daylight between your competing towers is a place of tension where you can really engage. If your beliefs are wholly alien, you can huff and puff and swear and mock and do all the annoying stuff people do online, but you probably won't get anywhere. There was never anything shared between you; no ability to respect the other opinion.  It's hard to know that, though, because online everyone is a black box of memes and dumb little jokes. It's often unclear what people really believe until you're arguing, and by then y...

My best friend loves Madea. I'm not really the world's biggest Tyler Perry fan, but I do respect that Madea, with her tough exterior and warm heart, has at least a little in common with Medea, the ancient Greek sorceress. I'm reviewing Medea , the ancient Euripides play. I've actually seen it performed (my high school had a very dedicated theater program) but mostly I'm reviewing it as a book, because I think that's how most people experience it nowadays. Plus, I don't have the ability to judge theater. Medea tells the story of the sorceress Medea, who is left by her husband for another woman. This is pretty much the entire plot structure: what you then get is about an hour and a half of rage, betrayal, and hatred. The story is told entirely through dialogue—as you'd expect for a play—but most of the important information comes from lengthy monologues, mostly by Medea herself. Those are what make the play an interesti...