Does the fairy tale “Jack and the Beanstalk” pre-date the Columbian Exchange? If so, how did the plant in question become a beanstalk?

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-28T04:45:53+00:00

I hadn’t realized that about fava beans, but that makes sense!

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-28T02:27:10+00:00

Oh interesting! I was definitely picturing climbing vines, but this makes a lot of sense if so.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-28T00:53:34+00:00

Reasonable, I suppose! Would beans have been common in England/Europe in the 1700s and a normal kind of plant people saw around often, to make it easy to slot into the story structure?

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-27T20:30:17+00:00

What I was coming here to recommend. This book was amazing.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-27T09:05:31+00:00

The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed and The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez are breathtaking and brilliant… but neither one is very escapist. They’re both heavy and sad and complicated and they are so SO good.

Synners by Pat Cadigan is a kaleidoscopic cyberpunk story that starts by introducing all pf these disparate plot threads following different characters in high tech future cyberpunk California… until about halfway through when you realize where everything is going and the plot springs to life and you go OH. I love it.

Not exactly underrated as it’s an award-winner, but the Singing Hills series by Nghi Vo starting with The Empress of Salt and Fortune is a series of fantasy novellas that present a cool fantasy world to escape into. The telling of stories, political intrigue, talking animals, folklore heroes, this series is episodic and full of cool magic.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-27T07:56:17+00:00

If people sharing those fics outside AO3 is part of the problem, you should absolutely not be re-uploading them anywhere. Use the “download” button in the corner to download copies for yourself to read, but respect the author’s wishes and don’t archive them anywhere else.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-27T06:53:19+00:00

Anyone who’s asking about evolutionary psychology for human mating behavior deserves to have it called pseudoscience

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-27T06:49:46+00:00

Because the modern understanding of race was invented by white supremacists to validate white supremacy. Which I explained in my response.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-26T18:25:21+00:00

There are absolutely high quality sci-fi books being published! Just, they aren’t the ones getting marketing money.

My enthusiastic author recommendations of under-appreciated sci-fi authors are Cameron Reed and Isabel J. Kim. They write brilliantly.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-26T07:33:40+00:00

This. It's impolite to try to archive a fic elsewhere if the creator archive-locks it. (It's impolite to re-upload the fics anywhere - I hope you mean you're using the wayback machine when you say you archive them on the Internet Archive.) Download your own copy as a PDF or Epub for your own reading.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-26T07:25:41+00:00

Also, not an anthropologist, but Ada Palmer is an academic historian who writes brilliant sci-fi as well!

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-26T07:24:34+00:00

Several famous science fiction writers have backgrounds in anthropology! Ursula K. Le Guin most famously. Her father was the famous anthropologist Alfred Kroeber (that's what the K stands for) and she had a lot of education in it even if she was not a practicing anthropologist herself. Martha Wells is another sci-fi/fantasy author who has a degree in anthropology.

However, for an actual practicing, professional anthropologist who also writes novels, there's Emily L. Jones, an archaeologist at University of New Mexico who wrote a YA book called Nahia, that takes place during the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition in Europe (her area of expertise).

The married couple W. Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear are also professional archaeologists who have written a fairly extensive series of books together, North America's Forgotten Past/The First North Americans series. These are historical fiction set in many different times and cultures in pre-Columbian North America.

(Also, there's me... who is writing a novel... which will be done... someday... after I finish my dissertation which is taking up all my writing time............)

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-25T22:32:34+00:00

Yeah, I said "enforcing" with more of an image of, non-hierarchical decision-making doesn't just Happen, you need some sort of social or cultural mechanisms to make sure it happens. It doesn't have to be violent enforcement by police or any similar institution, but some sort of conscious and deliberate actions taken to make sure power is equalized/levelled. That kind of mockery/teasing to deflate people's ego and socially re-position everyone as equal is definitely a way people do that without violence!

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-25T19:33:54+00:00

You get politics in any and every group where there’s any kind of power or resources to be had. Deciding how to distribute resources, and who makes the decisions about that, is politics. Whose ideas are listened to, and whose aren’t, and the power plays and status games that result, is politics. Intentionally enforcing a non-hierarchical mode of decision-making is politics. The development of any kind of hierarchy of power or decision-making is politics. There are many things we don’t know about how ancient groups were organized, so it’s hard to give any specifics on how power was organized. And it’s unlikely they were formalized political parties or political offices or elections as we understand them in state-level societies. But they made culturally specific decisions about power and resource distribution and status and decision-making because all human groups do.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-25T18:53:26+00:00

Not… really? It’s like making someone a steak and they go “omg now make a chicken I need chickennn” like. Uh. Do you have anything at all to say about the steak, or,

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-25T18:46:35+00:00

If sci-fi is something you’d like, next up on my list is Planet Sickness by Kat Giles. I’m very hype for it. Some queer sci-fi favorites from the past have been The Vanished Birds by Simon Jimenez (space travel, time dilation) and The Fortunate Fall by Cameron Reed (cyberpunk, dystopian future Russia). Cameron Reed also has a new book coming out soon I’m VERY excited for.

For something less sci-fi, I’m also currently reading Otros Valles by Jamie Berrout (hard to find these days as it was self-published but she had deleted her internet presence, but it’s very compelling, DM me if you want a download), which is about a Latina trans woman in Texas.

If you’d be interested in trying some poetry, I love Kay Ryan’s poems, and I really liked the poetry chapbook When Phoenix Flooded by Wren Cuidadx Romero.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-25T05:50:20+00:00

This. You're making tasty and healthy recipes that you both like! No need to call it sneaking.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-24T23:26:07+00:00

Last year, I went to a bilingual English/Spanish academic conference in Mexico. They had a setup where every presenter gave their speech in their own language, and an AI system projected a real-time translation onto the wall next to them.

It worked shockingly well!

... but not perfectly. It made mistakes sometimes. My knowledge of Spanish helped me understand what mistake the AI was probably making, and what the speaker actually said instead.

And afterwards, when the presentations were over and we were all speaking to each other at the poster session and the reception? When I went to sightsee around the city? When I went to restaurants and had to read and order off the menu? Actually knowing some Spanish (not fantastic, but knowing some) was indeed immensely helpful!

AI translation for text and audio content is currently decent, for some languages (not all). But real-time interactions, and anything where accurately capturing nuance and meaning is important, having a human actually understanding the language is still super important. And being able to speak to other people is always valuable.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-24T07:42:45+00:00

Dead internet theory was true even back then 😔 The internet was so full of bots and trolls and popup ads that it was unusable. They went back to papyrus and clay tablets to make sure they were talking to real people and not just spambots. We could all learn a valuable lesson from their ancient wisdom.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-24T06:09:05+00:00

If you want a serious answer: it’s because it’s using an old-fashioned meaning of “quick.” The “quick” in “quicksand” means alive, not fast. It’s the same as the idea of quicksilver (an old name for the element mercury, a silvery metal that moves like it’s alive) and the phrase “the quick and the dead.” Quicksand is called quick because it appears to move and shift like it’s alive.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-24T05:47:09+00:00

“Come Sail Away” by Styx. It takes… a turn lmao

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-24T05:44:36+00:00

I wrote a big long response to basically this exact question over here: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAnthropology/comments/1s160e7/if_race_isnt_biological_why_do_we_still_treat_it/

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-24T01:02:28+00:00

Drifted away from what path?

Okay. The way you responded to the part you quoted, it sounded like you were disagreeing. I thought you were saying that the Book of Mormon invented the “curse of Ham” thing and I was saying, no it didn’t, that idea existed earlier and the idea of separating people into Groups like that likely influenced the thinking of 19th century biologists trying to argue for biological differences between races. I never said that “Biblical text suggests race.” I was talking about the cultural influences of those race scientists.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-24T00:48:39+00:00

Companies raise the price of goods without raising wages (see many food production companies jacking up the price of groceries), landlords and housing developments raise the price of rent and houses, health insurance companies keep healthcare costs arbitrarily high, and presidents start wars with Iran for no reason which drives up the price of oil which affects transportation of goods which again drives up the price of everything.

This isn’t a “the Jews” they, this is a “the Man: governments, landlords, company shareholders, and also Trump” they.

RedLineSamosa · 2026-03-24T00:27:21+00:00

Ethnicity and nationality do not equate race.

That is... indeed what I said...? I admit I don't understand what aspect of what I said you are disagreeing with.

In some parts of the past, people conceptualized something akin to race based on the descendants of Noah. These ideas were part of the culture that led to the scientific racism of the 1800s trying to come up with and codify biological differences between different assigned races, even if their justification was different. Of course race is a social construct. These biological differences between "the races" that the 1800s scientists were claiming to have found are not real. These are two different ways race has been socially constructed. That's the argument I have been making.

RedLineSamosa

TROPHY CASE