Book review: "The Tyrant Baru Cormorant"
Jul. 10th, 2025 05:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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Author: Seth Dickinson
Genre: Fantasy
! Spoilers for books 1 & 2 below ! (Book 1 review) (Book 2 review)
Challenge 1: Hodge Podge A new challenge idea I came up with all sorts of things to get players rolling out the fills and scoring points!
Sign up: July 3 Rd to July 19th @ 8PM EST / 12AM GTM
Opening Date: July 20
Closing Date: October 12
i've noticed a plethora of new Cohost people on Bluesky in the past few days—not an interesting observation to most of you, i'm sure. what makes it interesting to me is that so many of these people swore off social media when Cohost announced its shutdown. but here they are, on social media again. this feels like a rather depressing coda to the website, and it makes me think.
did Cohost lose? i use that somewhat rhetorically here—a website can't lose, Cohost's ideals will probably always be represented here or there and by its userbase—but it does feel like most of the initial optimism of what would come after Cohost has faded away, replaced with nothing but resignation to consolidating where everyone else is. for some people there had been a sense that a Cohost blogosphere would rise from the ruins of the site and, at least initially, a lot of people did set up blogs or personal websites. there were other projects too; my particular lot has been cast in with the Website League and Auldnoir (a forum not intended to be a post-Cohost, but which had huge overlap with the site), while others set up the Fourth Place Forum
but less than a year later it doesn't seem like much of any of this is going anywhere. Website League is reasonably active for what it is, but entropy has clearly taken its course in momentum for the project; it's worse with Fourth Place Forum as far as i can tell. and the Cohost blogosphere is, frankly, moribund from my perspective and in my pretty sizable RSS feed. a lot of people have lapsed into complete dormancy, while even blogs that aren't often really post with any consistency.1 most of the updates are made by about five blogs.
what we've all seemingly done is, as Jae described in "(a) cohost postmortem", consolidated back into the mostly-corporate places we already were—retreated into smaller communities on Discord or Tumblr and stuck outposts on Bluesky to signal that we still exist. this is very understandable—most of my social interactions with others are also on Discord (via OTAlt), so it's not like i'm in some holier than thou position to throw stones here—but it does also suggest that, collectively, we've given up on better things being possible online. if not by word, undoubtedly by deed. perhaps if Fukuyama had simply theorized that dissolution of Cohost was the fabled end of history rather than the dissolution of the Soviet Union he'd have a real argument. the Last Website seems a very capitalist-realist one these days, more a Twitter and less a Cohost.
the n+1th website reality—what a time. we're all in our own silos now, and naturally we're (unless you're fortunate enough to have a good Mastodon instance, i suppose) no closer to having any input over the form and function of those silos in practice. the creep of theocratic fascism and technofeudalism continue on the backend, the hegemony of the technolibertarians continues over the front. when Discord inevitably shits itself everybody will presumably be in for some rather painful adjustment having put our eggs in one basket. but we're already paying for consequences of the silo model besides a singular point of failure. "you are probably better served among friends," says Jae, and i agree with this, but the Group Chat form—as mediated through the silos we're all stuck in now—is not exactly conducive to large-scale reproduction. if Cohost was the public square where i could constantly interact with (and receive feedback from) many people of all stripes, what is now asked of me is structurally analogous to personally visiting dozens of homes every day for a social gathering. even if i had the energy to do that (i don't), i don't want to. neither do most people. most of my Cohost connections have withered as such.
anything meaningful that can be done to change course is a task that necessitates something higher-order than individual theory or action. i am exhausted. but i laid out my cards (for what that's worth) in minifesto for a democratic website confederation (draft)—because what else is there to do?—and i struggle to think what else i can say on the subject. i quoted Gramsci on the interregnum there because it implies some possibility of drastic change, but maybe i should quote Mike Davis on Gramsci instead. "Everyone is quoting Gramsci on the interregnum," he observed before his death, "but that assumes that something new will be or could be born. I doubt it." what next? what next?
1 admittedly, i have lapses of not blogging for a few months myself—it's been particularly hard to even think about restarting Cohost Union News in the site's shadow, because the prosociality is part of what made it feel useful to blog about union stuff.
Himself had lost his favourite tote bag - it was buffy-themed, not just your random thank-you-for-over-spending-in-our-shop bag. We turned the house upside down, and then I found it yesterday. It was in the car and has probably been there for weeks. Man reunited with buffy tote bag, all is well.
Cat is doing okay. Something happened to him Sunday night (chased by a dog, got lost IDK), and he spent Monday being a very tired old sad cat. I was that worried, I phoned the vet. Got told to let sleeping cats sleep, bring him in if condition persisted. Anyhows, he cheered up and Tuesday he had energy enough to eat an entire can of tuna, complain loudly and wash himself fluffy. All is well.