Objects in Rear-Facing Camera/Mirror Are Farther Than They Appear

 On the insidious creeping plague of strangers who think I should care about their opinion of my appearance and gender presentation

Twice in four days this week, a complete stranger followed me into a parking lot and screamed slurs at me over nothing.

I've written about this before, but I need to write something more complete. Not because these two incidents were unusual for me. Because they weren't. This has been happening my whole life, and I'm tired of treating each one like a weird one-off.

Saturday: Farmer Joe's

I exited 580 at 35th Ave, turned left from the left lane, then moved to the right lane to turn into the Farmer Joe's lot. The black Tesla in front of me stopped suddenly as I positioned myself on the right side of the lane. He sat there for about 30 seconds, with more than a car length of open road ahead of him. Then he put his blinker on and turned in.

He took the first open space. I drove around and parked a couple of spaces deeper, on the other side.

I hadn't even put my car in park when he was standing outside my closed passenger window, screaming "CUNT" at me. A woman in the lot called out right away: "That's not cool, what is wrong with you?"

I got out anyway. Probably a mistake. He kept going at full volume: every misogynist slur you can think of. I walked quickly toward the store, because there's usually a security guard at the door. He followed, walking sideways next to me, screaming about my driving, the speed limit, and everything under the sun.

I looked at him and said, "This is very undignified. Why are you screaming?"

I told him I wasn't speeding. He said I'd been 12 inches from his bumper and he had it all recorded. I said, "So call the police."

Then he accused me of following him, stalking him, and getting in his face. This from the man who had just screamed slurs at a stranger's car window.

The woman from the lot brought the security guard over, who told us both to just not talk to each other. By then the man had disappeared somewhere. I doubt he ever meant to shop there. I think he was looking for a reason to make a scene.

I'm 5'10", and he was smaller than me. I honestly had the feeling he was hoping for a fistfight.

I drive a 4Runner. It sits higher than a Tesla. I've had bigger vehicles than mine move in behind me plenty of times, and somehow I've managed not to take it personally.

Tuesday: Pet Food Express on Piedmont

I was leaving Sprouts on Broadway in Oakland, headed to Pet Food Express on Piedmont. I turned left onto Broadway and changed lanes to the right for the turn onto Piedmont. I did it safely: no speeding, no tailgating, no gestures, no flashing headlights. There was at least a car length between us at the turn.

After the turn, the driver in front of me started swerving and braking erratically. It was raining, so I assumed she'd dropped something or couldn't see well. I left more than two car lengths. At the red light she moved to the right lane and I went ahead. Then she pulled out and came up behind me. When the light changed I drove on (Piedmont is 20 mph) and turned into the Pet Food Express lot.

She followed me in and pulled up right behind my car, blocking me in. She rolled down all her windows and started shouting at the top of her lungs.

She didn't say a word about the lane change. She went straight for the stickers on my back window. "What do you think you were doing? Trying to run me off the road? What's with your sparkly rainbow?" And then, over and over: "FAGGOT! FAGGOT! FAGGOT!"

The "sparkly rainbow" is a row of six tiny cat stickers, each about 2.5 inches tall, each a different color, each in a different pose. Over the years people have told me they're cute. One guy thought they were Grateful Dead bears.

She was loud enough that people came out of the pet store and the businesses next door to see what was going on. I locked my car and walked around the back of it toward the store. As I did, she tried to back her car into me. This was up close, just like the man at Farmer Joe's looking for a fistfight. The only thing I said back was, "You don't even know what that means!"

This isn't new

This started when I was a kid. Strangers would walk up and tell me, "What a shame, you'd be so pretty if it wasn't for your nose" (or chin, or face, or whatever they picked that day). Adults said that to a child.

As an adult, it's mostly "faggot," yelled at me from cars and sidewalks. Men walk up and feel entitled to ask, "Are you a woman or really a man?" I've been asked to leave women's bathrooms, in San Francisco, for supposedly being trans.

And it hasn't always stayed verbal:

• 2002. On 9th Street between Folsom and Howard in San Francisco, half a block from AsiaSF, four guys decided I was trans. They tripped me, and once I was on the ground they started kicking me, asking each other, "Dude, is that a dude, dude?" It could easily have ended with a broken jaw if one of them hadn't suddenly realized, "Dude, it's not a dude," and pulled me up by the hand. Then the ringleader had the nerve to ask me, "So what are you? A man or a woman?" I tried to slap him, but I was shaking too hard. I ran all the way to Market Street, got on the train, and went to my friends' house as planned, where they fed me cocktails and I slept on their sofa. I was lucky to get away with just a torn meniscus in my right knee.
• Safeway, Oakland, about five years ago. I was in my textile motorcycle jacket and pants. A woman ran at me with her metal shopping cart and rammed me into an open freezer door, then ran off. Later she came looking for me in the checkout line and tried to hit me again, screaming, "You're a lady trying to be a man!"
• 18th & Castro, San Francisco. I was waiting to cross with two friends, standing just behind them, off to the side of the crosswalk, in my riding gear with my helmet in a messenger bag. There was plenty of room to wait. A man shorter than me walked up anyway and started shoving me, deliberately trying to force his way between me and my friends: "You big fucking dyke, you're taking up too much space." My friends didn't even notice. I told him to stop touching me and back off. Three men nearby heard it and shamed him until he ran off into traffic.
• MacArthur Blvd, Oakland. I was walking my bike to the post office, steering with my right hand and holding a box to ship in my left arm. I was in the middle of the crosswalk, in morning light. A driver coming down Maybelle ran the stop sign and rolled right into my leg. He wasn't even looking forward; he was looking to his left and never stopped. I yelled "Hey!" but he wasn't looking or listening. Then he parked, got out, and screamed at me, "You don't touch a man's car!" With my bike and box on the ground, he chest-bumped me backward into oncoming traffic on MacArthur. He was about 6'6" and 350 pounds. Apparently it was my fault that he ran a stop sign without looking. The men inside Kragen Auto Parts heard him yelling and watched through the window. Not one came out.
• MacArthur at Maple, Oakland, 2020. I was driving home and approaching a red light where cars were already stopped. The driver behind me crossed the double yellow into oncoming traffic to pass me on the left, then cut to the far right lane, but couldn't turn because of traffic on Maple. I hadn't pulled all the way up; I'd left about two car lengths. For some reason that insulted them. The driver got out of the car with a handgun tucked in their pants, showing it, and kept saying, "Come on! Come on! Fight me!" I didn't make eye contact, didn't say a word, and drove off the moment the light changed.
• Franklin Street, August 2021. I was finishing crossing the street from my parking space. There were no other pedestrians and no other cars. A young Black man in an unusually big pickup with a lift kit (not the kind of truck you usually see in Oakland) turned right onto Franklin, where he had three driving lanes all to himself, just to yell at me that I had a "flat ass." I told him, "I don't care what you think." That made him furious. He threw the truck in reverse and kept shouting at me, and I kept saying, "Your opinion doesn't matter. I don't care what you think." The young Black woman in his passenger seat screamed and laughed, and threw her drink, ice and all, toward me as I walked up to people eating in a parklet. All I could think was: run, girl, you're next.
• On my bicycle, more times than I can count. Drivers swerve at me and throw things out their windows: water bottles, cups with their drinks and ice. Riding up Redwood Road, with two lanes and only one in use, someone yelled, "Get a job and pay some taxes!" Once, riding on MacArthur, I passed a line of cars stopped at the red light at High Street and went up on the curb to make my right turn onto High, because there's an awkward bulb-out there and the first car had no turn signal on. I never touched her car or interacted with her in any way. The woman driving one of those cars came after me anyway, down High Street, swerving around other people to get close enough to scream at me, and threw her iced coffee at me.
• My own street. A man I kept seeing in my neighborhood would swerve at me while I was on my bike. He drove up onto the sidewalk to do it, and once went around the whole block just to come back and swerve at me again. I finally got his license plate and called the police. Neighbors told me he was a regular speeder on our block. I never saw him again.

I've tried to find a pattern, and there isn't one, unless I'm just cursed. Mostly men, and mostly white men, though some women too. Young and old, drivers and pedestrians, people who seem unwell and people performing for their friends. I've been wearing a dress, motorcycle gear, bike shorts and a cycling jersey with cats on it, a T-shirt and cords on my way to work. None of these people knew a single thing about me. They looked at me, decided I was something they were allowed to attack, and acted on it. The insult changes. The entitlement doesn't.

It doesn't matter if I'm (not) trans

I'm a queer woman, and I'm not trans. But I've been knocked to the ground and kicked by a group of four men, shoved toward traffic, rammed with a shopping cart, and screamed at for being trans more times than I can count. When people talk about this, women like me usually get mentioned in passing, as allies who sometimes catch some of the heat. But none of the people who attacked me knew or cared whether I was an ally. They weren't reacting to my politics. They decided I was trans and that this made me fair game.

That's how this kind of hatred works: it doesn't check. It lands on whoever doesn't match a stranger's idea of what a woman should look like. Trans people carry the worst of it, and I'm not here to compare scars.

And this isn't about pronouns or etiquette. If someone misgenders me by mistake, fine. I'll correct them and move on. What's unreasonable is a complete stranger calling me a faggot, demanding to know if I'm "really a man," or telling me I don't belong in the women's bathroom, when I've done nothing to them and pose no threat to anyone. People are being verbally and physically assaulted in public, in some of the most "accepting" cities in the country. It reaches further than people think, and it's everyone's problem.

It doesn't matter if I'm (she/they/he)

I don't care what pronouns people use for me. That was never the point. I'm not trying to make a statement about gender in either direction. I wear T-shirts, joggers, shorts, and hoodies. I just don't care, and I don't take the time or trouble to conform. Honestly, I don't think about gender much at all. I get accused of being too logical and too sensitive at the same time, which tells me the whole thing is mostly made up anyway.

What I can't get past is this: a woman driving to the grocery store, or biking to work, or waiting at a crosswalk, gets screamed at, shoved, kicked, or rammed with a cart, by people who have never met her. Every time, the stranger seems completely sure they're the one who was wronged. A lane change becomes "stalking." Six cat stickers become a reason to block someone in, scream slurs at her, and try to back a car into her.

It doesn't matter whether I'm trans or not. It's none of your business. And if someone is trans, it's still none of your business. When a person is just minding their own business, there's no cause for any of this. Even the car incidents would have been an overreaction if I'd rear-ended both of those drivers, and I didn't.

What it really comes down to is people making their own insecurities and poor mental health someone else's problem. It isn't my problem. I don't care what you think. Leave me alone.

REVIEW: "The Unhaunting" by Micaiah Johnson (5-stars)

 The Unhaunting is one of the most original haunted-house novels I've read in years. What makes it so effective is that the house isn't merely haunted. In many ways, the house is the haunting.

The supernatural entity at the center of the novel doesn't just inhabit the house. It reshapes the house, rewrites memories, hides doors, conceals spaces, alters history, and even inserts its own voice into the narrative. I loved the way it occasionally interrupts the story in first person, reminding the reader that this isn't just a setting. The house is a character with desires and intentions of its own.

What makes the book feel deeply gothic is the way the horror is layered through generations of pain and trauma. The house is built from contaminated histories, and its attic becomes a repository for secrets, grief, racialized violence, and buried truths. The entity feeds on these things while simultaneously trying to erase them.

The house presents itself as a place of safety. It wants to protect the people it loves. But its version of love is possessive and consuming. It steals memories, transfers pain onto innocent people, rewrites reality, and prevents loss by taking away the parts of us that make loss meaningful. Characters like Avery, Tobias, and Hakeem are left carrying a sense that something is missing from their lives without being able to identify what. The damage remains even when the memories are gone.

One detail that stayed with me was the changing architecture of the house itself. Avery tells Shantell as children that the house has no porch. Years later, when she arrives for the first time with Avery, it suddenly has the wraparound porch she always dreamed of. The house isn't simply changing. It's becoming what people want. It seduces as much as it threatens.

What ultimately made the novel work for me, though, was Shantell's realization that grief cannot be erased without erasing part of yourself. The house offers her everything she wants: romantic love, safety, family, comfort, certainty, status. But every gift comes at someone else's expense. She realizes she cannot allow the house to "fix" the world by transferring pain onto innocent people.

In the end, Shantell honors her family not by staying with them, but by saving herself. She chooses integrity over comfort, reality over illusion, and an imperfect life over a beautiful lie.

What makes the ending especially haunting is that the bargain remains. Avery stays. Tobias returns. Emily comes back. Shantell escapes, but she is left watching from a distance, wondering what price they continue to pay for the safety and happiness the house provides. The monster isn't defeated so much as temporarily sated.

The best horror isn't really about monsters. It's an existential mystery wrapped in the supernatural. The Unhaunting is ultimately about grief, memory, identity, and the seductive promise of escaping pain. It was the perfect Halloween read, and it will linger for a while.  I can't wait to see this on the big screen - I predict it will get picked up for an adaptation!

REVIEW: "The Unhaunting" by Micaiah Johnson

RATING: 5-stars

REVIEW: Willow by Marisa Billions (5-stars) - Sapphic! Gothic! Horror!

I really enjoyed Willow. What kept me turning pages wasn't just the mystery surrounding Willow herself, but the way everyone around her reacted. People could see Willow perfectly well. The fascinating part was that they all seemed to know something was wrong, even when they couldn't quite articulate it. They talked around the problem long before anyone confronted it directly.

What stayed with me most was the relationship between Rowan and Willow. Willow isn't simply a ghost from the past. She's something far more unsettling: a supernatural presence that seems able to take shape through memory, desire, and longing. That ambiguity allows the story to explore the difference between love and need, and the danger of mistaking one for the other.

The people around Rowan don't necessarily understand what Willow is, but they recognize the effects. They watch Rowan stop eating properly, stop caring for herself, withdraw from her friends, and give up the parts of her life that once brought her joy. They may not be able to name the problem, but they know they are losing her.

As Willow's influence grows, Rowan increasingly chooses Willow over everything else. She attempts to isolate herself and subsume herself within the relationship. What ultimately made the story work for me, though, was the persistence of the people who refused to let that happen. Selene, Janet, Susan, and others keep showing up, even when Rowan pushes them away. In many ways, the central conflict becomes simple: Rowan keeps choosing Willow, and everyone else keeps choosing Rowan.

The book has strong gothic horror elements, with a house that feels increasingly shaped by the presence within it and a growing sense of unease as Rowan's world narrows. What stayed with me most, however, wasn't the supernatural mystery. It was the exploration of love versus need, desire versus fulfillment, and the people who refuse to give up on someone they care about.

If you enjoy atmospheric horror, complex relationships, and stories that linger after you've finished them, Willow is well worth a read.

REVIEW: Willow by Marisa Billions
RATING: 5-stars

FOAS Bad Pet Art - Dwight

 

Dwight approves of his appliqué portrait!

REVIEW: Queen of Faces by Petra Lord (2.5 stars)

 The premise hooked me: the “pith” is the person and the body is just a chassis you drive. But the worldbuilding never earns it. Memory, language, and even personhood turn out to be editable or winnable in contests, yet the book also insists that a bad body will kill you, so the metaphor strains against its own plot. And nobody ever asks who makes these bodies. Scalzi’s Old Man’s War shows you the engineering and the branding, and Bennett’s biotech has a visible supply chain. Here, fully functional bodies just show up.

The “humdrum” label felt needlessly pejorative to me, especially once you learn magic is a learnable skill. The divide is access to training, not nature, which makes the contempt look like class snobbery in costume. The same goes for the “Edgar” brand for the cheap male chassis, which was a smart touch of shaming through vocabulary.

I wanted more from the gender angle. Ten years in a male body while living as a girl, and Nell being forced into one, gave the story real stakes. But the body market offers only two models, both built to a narrow, pale, lean beauty standard. For a world where you can choose your body, that’s an oddly limited menu, and the book doesn’t seem interested in questioning it.

The bigger picture reads as a totalitarian regime: it can erase names, wipe a people’s language until they drown themselves, and ration magic through one academy. All of that is more compelling than the surface plot. As for the blood and torture in a YA book, the darkness fits the themes, but it sometimes felt like escalation rather than insight.

Interesting ideas, thin foundations. I’d read the sequel only if it finally shows where the bodies come from and find out whether Nell decides she was happier in a "boy" body.

REVIEW: Queen of Faces by Petra Lord (2.5 stars)

REVIEW: A Wall is Also a Road by Annalee Newitz (5-stars)

I really enjoyed this book. Writing a novel from an alien perspective is a unique challenge, and Newitz handles it with confidence and creativity. Gardenpath, our protagonist, comes from a distant galaxy where gender doesn’t exist. They’re an amoeba — a Rational person — studying at the Memory and hoping to excel in a program that will allow them to become an investigator. Their people experience time differently and use teleportation as a matter of course, so Earth has long been dismissed as a lifeless rock. Gardenpath’s decision to research Earth is already a break from cultural assumptions.

Newitz builds the Memory with impressive cohesion: how Rational people move, communicate, express emotion, and interact feels fully imagined. I especially enjoyed the interpersonal dynamics on campus between Gardenpath and their friends, adversaries, and professors. The academic environment feels lived‑in — there’s genuine competition among students, supportive and wise mentors, and maybe a few corrupt professors, tolerated in ways that say a lot about the institution. These relationships give the Memory a social texture that makes Gardenpath’s ambitions and struggles feel grounded.

As Gardenpath begins traveling to Earth more frequently, Newitz introduces one of the novel’s most interesting structural choices. About two‑thirds of the way through, the narration shifts to she/her pronouns while Gardenpath is on Earth in a female‑appearing body and using the name Peristyle. When the story returns to the Memory, the pronouns revert to they/them. It’s a subtle way of showing how embodiment and context shape identity — and it also highlights Gardenpath’s discipline as a researcher. In fieldwork, there’s always the risk of “going native,” losing the critical distance needed to study a culture. Gardenpath’s best friend, Oriel, and their informal advisor, Column, both warn them about this, encouraging them to maintain boundaries and stay honest with the people they meet on Earth. Gardenpath manages to keep the perspective of a foreign scholar, navigating Earth with curiosity rather than assimilation. Readers interested in this theme might explore identity shifts in field research or gender fluidity in alien narratives.

The Earth subplot provides a strong counterpoint. Gardenpath’s repeated visits to Pompeii, their friendship with Murtis, and their gradual understanding of gender all build naturally on the emotional and intellectual groundwork laid in the campus chapters. Moving between the Memory and Earth creates a rhythm that lets their internal growth unfold across both worlds, and the contrast between settings keeps the narrative fresh.

Gardenpath’s “galaxy suit,” which lets them pass as human by configuring itself to mimic other people, is a great device — especially once you add tentacles. There’s some amoeba sex, people sex, and interspecies sex; it’s not excessive, and it feels like a nod to Octavia Butler’s Oankali in Lilith’s Brood. It fits the story’s exploration of embodiment and identity without overwhelming the plot.

By the end, Gardenpath and their cohort gather enough evidence to permanently oust the toxic professor — a figure who literally injects students with toxins and interrogates them like captives. The students’ decision to found a new institution, New Memory, feels like a natural extension of their growth and opens an intriguing direction for future novels.

I loved the ending, and I’d happily read more about Gardenpath in whatever comes next. This was a fun, imaginative read that balances worldbuilding, character development, and thematic curiosity in a way that really worked for me.

UPDATE: FOAS Bad Pet Art Portraits - DELIVERED

 I heard from my friend that she got a note that her portrait of Dwight was delivered, and Newmie's mom reached out to me with photos of Newmie giving his approval of his portrait. 

How cute is that dog? I love him and I haven't even met him!

REVIEW: Mindwise by Nicholas Epley (3-stars)

A competent, readable survey of the psychology of "reading" other minds — mind perception, dehumanization, overconfidence in our assumptions about what others think and feel — but it plays like a 201-level undergrad course compiled into book form. Greatest-hits research, popular studies you've likely encountered before, stitched together with narrative glue rather than a distinct original argument. If you've spent any real time in organizational behavior or social psych, there's not much new territory here.

A recurring pattern across the book: study after study on perspective-taking shows people just imagining what someone else is thinking, and getting it wrong — not randomly, but in ways that trace back to their own biases and insecurities. Epley leans on the old Carlin bit about how everyone driving slower than you is an idiot and everyone driving faster is a maniac — a good shorthand for how our own reference point quietly becomes the norm we judge everyone else against. His actual prescription is sharper than the usual "walk a mile in their shoes" platitude: he argues for trying to get someone's perspective by asking and listening, rather than taking it by imagining your way into their head — which is really just projection with extra steps. It's a solid reframe, but by the back half of the book the same basic move (person imagines, person is wrong, bias is the culprit) repeats often enough to feel like a broken record.

One fact genuinely stopped me: Epley notes infants routinely underwent surgery without anesthesia until the early 1990s, because doctors didn't believe infants could feel pain — I had to look it up to confirm it. It also tracked with my own experience: I had a titanium screw removed from my ulna in 1990, and the doctor gave me only local anesthesia to open the skin before taking a ratcheting wrench to the hex bolt in my arm, confidently informing me "there are no nerve endings in the bone." It hurt like hell, and he looked genuinely shaken that I reacted. But that story is really two failures stacked on top of each other, and only one of them is what Epley's book is actually about. His book is about the moment-to-moment failure to model someone else's mind — the imagining-instead-of-asking problem. What happened to me is the deeper version: that doctor, likely in his 50s, had been trained on a certified fact ("no nerve endings in bone") the same way an earlier generation of doctors had been trained that infants don't feel pain. He wasn't guessing badly about my mind in the moment — he was executing a belief the field had already gotten wrong for him, before he ever picked up the wrench. That's a colder failure than anything perspective-taking exercises can fix, and the book doesn't really go there.

The one place the book clearly earns its keep: a sharp critique of the iceberg model that's calcified into gospel in leadership and PM training. Epley's objection is that the metaphor reinforces the myth that we only use 10% of our brains — implying the unconscious "90%" is dormant, untapped potential. He argues that's backwards: the unconscious runs most of what you do in a given moment, while consciousness handles the smaller job of making sense of your behavior after the fact so you can explain it to yourself and others. Genuinely useful for anyone who's sat through a training deck treating the submerged part of the iceberg as a vast reservoir waiting to be mined.

Solid intro-level primer if you're new to the subject. If you've already got the background, or you've read his later book on talking to strangers, "A Little More Social,"  you'll feel like you're watching him warm up for a better book he hadn't written yet.

NOTE:  It's a short read -- ends at around 70% on Kindle with the remainder being very extensive end notes.

REVIEW: Mindwise by Nichalas Epley
RATING: 3-stars

REVIEW: "Bodies of Magic" by Freya Marske (2.5)

I loved Freya Marske's The Cinder House. It created characters and a world that were interesting, funny and the story structure allowed for their growth.  This resulted in a working found family situation for the main protagonists. When I picked up Bodies of Magic, I was hoping for more. Maybe something along the lines of The Incandescent, which I adored. Instead, I got something along the lines of The Raven Scholar.

And you know what? That might just mean it's not my genre, which is fine. Preferences are real.

But there's a problem underneath the tone and pacing that goes deeper than genre mismatch. It's about what the book borrows and what it refuses to reckon with.

Bodies of Magic has a genuinely compelling mystery at its core: a brilliant student is dead, and there are institutional incentives to hide the death: keep students enrolled another year, keep the funding flowing, protect the academy's reputation. That's a meaty plot. There's real corruption there, real stakes. The detective work of uncovering what happened and why the institution had reason to want fail talented students training to meet a role that is in short supply in their world is really the book could sing.

And parts of it do. The mystery itself works. But the execution fractures everywhere else.

The protagonists swing between reading as young teenagers and college students gone wild -- not convincingly as both, not even convincingly as either one. The resolution doesn't feel earned; the villain makes a confession in front of a room of people without the setup to land it. The supporting cast feels ineffectual in ways that undermine rather than complicate the narrative.

These are craft problems, and they're real problems. But underneath them sits something that troubles me more.

In the real world -- the one you and I live in, the one Freya Marske lives in -- there are people who believe that physical illness can be healed through metaphysical, spiritual, or faith-based means instead of medicine. This isn't a metaphor. It isn't a thought experiment. It's a functioning ideology with practitioners and consequences.

Christian Science. Medical neglect in faith-healing churches. Anti-vax communities. The logic is the same: the body can be healed by belief, by prayer, by spiritual alignment, or, in this book's framing, by having the right magical gift.

The novel's portrayal of "healers" who cure illness through magical circles, humming, and singing risks romanticizing faith healing while overlooking its real-world consequences. Medical neglect is not limited to refusing vaccines; it can mean denying children doctors, hospitals, diagnostic tests, appropriate medicines, and even basic treatment for fever and pain. When serious illnesses are left untreated, the result can be preventable death, permanent hearing loss, neurological injury, developmental or behavioral difficulties, chronic disability, and lifelong suffering. The fantasy may present healing rituals as effective, but in real life, replacing evidence-based medical care with prayer or ritual can have devastating consequences, especially for children who cannot make that choice for themselves.

This is the ideology Bodies of Magic borrows and validates. The book tries to create distance by inventing fictitious ailments (phantomes, for instance) but it doesn't create enough distance. The logic remains unchanged: the body can be healed through non-material, non-scientific means, without ever engaging with how medicine actually works. The mechanism is magic instead of prayer, but the underlying delusion is identical.

The worldbuilding picks and chooses what exists based on plot convenience and aesthetic preference, not coherence.

Consider the infrastructure: the book includes hospitals, gyms, boxing clubs, self-defense training, pianos, and institutional bureaucracy sophisticated enough to set retirement ages at 70. Healers are revered as an elite, essential profession, yet they coexist with all these other systems. Why would a society have hospitals if magical healing works? Why gyms, why physical training, why concern about bodies at all? Why pianos and gymnasiums but also medieval garments and archaic names? Why sophisticated enough institutions to raise the retirement age, but not sophisticated enough to have a postal service—relying instead on wax seals on messenger-delivered notes?

While there's a non-binary character -- there's also repeated references to "whorish" as a pejorative descriptor (esp as related to short hair styles - sort of a 1950s/medieval-coded misogyny and shame-based sexual control) interspersed with olympian sexual exploits across characters.

Compare this to Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea, where magic students attend school and academy but remain embedded in society.  These magicians are revered for their skill as they would be for any other trade, integrated rather than separated, valued and relied upon as essential workers. That's a coherent world.

Bodies of Magic doesn't want coherence. It wants the aesthetic of medieval oppression (archaic clothing, gendered shame, class hierarchy, elite separation) layered over modern institutional infrastructure (hospitals, gyms, retirement systems). It borrows the visual and emotional texture of oppression without committing to understanding what any of it actually means.

And the faith-healing system is just the most ideologically charged example of this pattern.  The world also features elite hoarding of essential services as window dressing -- entire geographic areas are without proper medical care in this world.

By treating magical medicine as a functional, glamorous reality for an elite group of college students, the narrative unintentionally validates the internal logic of real-world faith healers. It proposes a world where the people who reject standard medicine are actually right—they just have access to something better. Everyone else just doesn't have the gift.

For anyone who has lived with the devastating, permanent consequences of that real-world delusion, this doesn't read as a fun magical escape. 

I'm not arguing that fantasy needs literal scientific accuracy. A hyperdrive is ridiculous. Enchanted swords are ridiculous. Dragons are ridiculous. Fantasy invents abstract impossibilities constantly, and that's the entire point.

But there's a difference between inventing an impossibility and borrowing a real-world ideology that has a body count.

A hyperdrive doesn't exist, and no one is dying because their parents tried to build one instead of taking them to the ER. It's pure invention. Harmless imagination.

A system where physical illnesses are treated through metaphysical, spiritual, or faith-based means? That's not pure invention. That's stepping directly into territory occupied by real, living people who use that exact logic to justify medical neglect.

The distinction isn't about realism. It's about tonal responsibility. When you borrow a real-world delusion that actively kills children and wrap it in aspirational, lighthearted narrative, you're not creating a fun alternate magic system. You're fulfilling a fantasy of a world where the people who reject medicine are actually right. That's not a neutral choice.

Bodies of Magic isn't a bad book. It has solid mystery structure, and the author clearly knows how to craft a narrative (see: The Cinder House).

But the premise is irresponsible, and the execution doesn't reckon with that irresponsibility. The tone stays light. The romance keeps the focus on interpersonal drama rather than systemic harm. The resolution is neat and unsatisfying.

2.5 stars feels right: good bones undone by a lack of tonal responsibility.

Maybe that's fine for readers who come to fantasy for escape and aren't carrying the specific trauma of having watched faith-healing ideology destroy people they love. Maybe for those readers, magical medicine is just another ridiculous trope, no different from a hyperdrive.

"Bad Art" Fundraiser Pet Portraits for Friends of Oakland Animal Services

In the past year, two really cute appliqué pet portraits have crossed my path - my friend Veronika made one of her cat Oscar, and a fan of a shop cat at Warner Mountain Weavers left one for Adrienne.  Naturally, when I saw a "Call for Artists" for the annual "Bad Art" fundraiser for FOAS, I signed up and decided to do appliqué pet portraits.  I looked at a few videos and instructional aides, but this one on Lorraine's "Quilting in the Fog" website gave me the simplest guidance for Pet Portrait Appliqué of all of them.  I printed the (sometimes cropped) photos to full 8.5 x 11" and used wax paper and sharpies to make templates. 

Here are the reference photos for Noomie the border collie, Dwight the ginger tabby, and Jojo who is a good boy (so said the note on the artist dashboard):

Here are a few WIP photos:

Newmie was the easiest -- his shapes were really clearly defined. As you see on the print out of his photo to the right, I had made some notes about how to approach and define the color areas, and then just traced with waxed paper using a sharpie and cut out the templates.  I pinned the waxed paper to fabric with Stitch Witchery already applied to the back side and used tiny scissors to snip it out.

He is a good boy!

Dwight was a bit trickier - I didn't feel I had enough fabrics close enough to his colors (my mac is not printing on my Brother CN3040 printer properly) but I think it worked out ok.  I know Dwight personally and wanted to give him a really good portrait.  Even though I was constrained by fabric selections (shockingly - I don't have a lot of beiges and browns in my stash), I used about 6 different thread colors (zoom in and you can see).

He is a good boy!

Jojo presented a different challenge:  the pose and the photo were a bit tricky to translate to "flat" without him looking like, well, roadkill.  I made his partly opened eye more open, added velvet to the belly and tail so he can be petted - and interpreted the words from the note "He is a good boy" so it's clear that this is a present tense Jojo!

NOTES AND TIPS:

• Stitch Witchery is the way to go; I considered using spray basting adhesive but that would have been trickier for smaller pieces.
• Use an unscented dryer sheet to clean off the sticky stuff from your iron.
• Iron - I used my small travel iron - just in case - and it was all I needed.
• Nonstick silicone cookie sheet mat worked really well to keep the Stitch Witchery webbing from sticking to my ironing pad.
• Velvet melts - lower heat and iron from the back to get the stitch witchery to stick or use spray stitching. 
• Upholstery samples are great backgrounds - just make sure to soak overnight and peel the paper from the backside.  I tried to sew through and broke a few needles. 
• Sewing:  my Singer 201 gives me the option to drop the feed dogs, which I did try with the embroidery foot but... without putting the piece in an embroidery hoop, it didn't feel right.  I just did this with the feed dogs in place, a transparent acrylic quilting foot, and lots of forward/backward on the stitch direction.

INSPIRATION:  

Visit the FOAS Bad Art Gallery and check out the portraits that inspired me!