I'm so sorry for your loss, Mark.

I dropped off of regular commenting about a year ago for life reasons, but I still think of you and the community regularly. My experience of Baize was him joyfully singing the Steven Universe theme in your ear while you winced. Remembering it always makes me smile. Even thinking of it right now, I smile.

We'll still be here when you're ready to come back.

I assume they were just on different specialty tracks.

I look forward to Gladys becoming the golem Judith Butler, as she will soon be able to articulate the utterly arbitrary nature of gender assignment and expectations.

Dorfl managed extremely sophisticated philosophy within a week. I don't think we should sell Gladys short just because she started on a slightly odd angle.

I remembered a specific example of this concern coming up after Moana was released: School librarians interested in being culturally sensitive and treating the Disney version as a jumping off point for getting students interested in Polynesian culture tried to make a recommendation list for books to stock.

They could only come up with something like 3 reasonably respectful titles available from the major affordable book wholesalers that serve American school libraries. They would have had to order single copies at retail prices with premium shipping, from New Zealand or from indie Hawaiian publishers. (Yes, Hawaii is a US state. Except culturally, where it is treated as forn parts, because racism.)

The books are being written, and published, in English. Good luck getting the distribution lines into an American public school without spending a fortune, though.

Tumblr hyperbole for "I am shocked." It's gotten a little abstract in there. Same mold as Mark's occasional statements along the lines of "And then I died and now my ghost is typing this, goodbye."

Sure, but what I'm saying is that if the bookstore doesn't carry it at all, and you have to drive an hour to get to the bookstore that does, that is a significant barrier to entry. It is only in the last decade that those barriers have slowly come down from the US markets, in the form of open-borders online shopping (for a long time, US customers weren't even allowed to shop on amazon.co.uk and were barred access to some titles that way) and streaming media that includes enough international content to be able to choose from more than 10 famous art-house films.

So the answer to your question is, until recently we had to actively climb out of the walled garden to even see there was a horizon.

* Edit to clarify: I know we are super-fortunate in general to have abundant, cheap access to books and movies. But since it's easy and cheap to get so much, most people never realize how artificially narrowed the range of available titles is. That's the part Rukbat was getting at. If you go to the grocery store and all that's on the shelves is 90 kinds of rice, you might well assume that what "variety" means is access to some really interesting kinds of rice. And then eventually you die of scurvy, but anyway.

Presumably enigmaticagentalice is human, or else incredibly circumspect.

USian here, I read and watched so much Brit Lit that I played around with using British spellings for a while. My youngest sister was assumed to be Canadian in grade school because her accent drifted under the influence of all the late-night PBS-BBC we would record and watch together on Saturday mornings. When I visited the UK for three weeks, I spent a full half of my time visiting places talked about in the books I grew up on.

I never heard of "gymkhana" outside this book.

As far as Bollywood, an awful lot of it has to do with access. Our media channels just. don't. sell. it. It's a big deal even in big cities when one of the *weird* artistic movie houses has a movie that needs subtitles. Video stores when those were a thing had very slim international sections. Without going and doing active research on our own, it does not come up as an option. 'Murican media is only interested in selling us 'Murican shows. (Hence recording all my Brit content late at night on PBS... and American media is pretty notably Brit-centric to the extent that it pays attention to anywhere else at all.)

Also, as someone who grew up in a super-white American town, it has taken a lot of practice in both the tech industry and watching stuff on Netflix with subtitles (again only recently available) to make out Indian-Anglo accents reliably. And I'm someone who's interested in making an effort and enjoys watching things with subtitles.

It takes truly active effort to get out of the all-American-all-the-time bubble. That curve has been dropping in the last decade due to streaming media, but the pattern is lonnnnnnnng.

Ooh, it's a thingswithwings. Ever since I saw the Yuletide Angel of the Morning vid, I've never met a thingswithwings vid I didn't like.