dorouu
(she/her/ella) ABC abroad. Lived 🇨🇳🇺🇸🇵🇭🇯🇵🇪🇸🇪🇨 Pretty OK Polyglot ✨De-colonial Feminist Killjoy ✨ Honorary brownbanded bamboo shark
6154 points
dorouu earned a badge
British & Irish Classic Literature
Gold: Finished 15 Main Quest books.
2dorouu commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
What’s your favorite book to movie adaptation? And do you refuse to watch a movie until you’ve read the book? (I do which means my TBR and TBW lists are both ridiculous)😭😅
15dorouu commented on a post
Hi everyone! I'm The_BookishBug (you can call me Bug or Vic). I’m so happy you’re looking into this quest! Here, we'll marvel at the intricate social lives of ants, take a closer look at the millipedes in your basement, and try to understand how a snail might experience the world!
I'm a lover of all things insect-related and currently work as an entomologist by day. I’ve had such a blast curating the book selection here! Even if you aren't a lover of all the creepy crawlies out there, please don't feel unwelcome! My hope is that everyone will find something to enjoy here, and gain a little bit of appreciation for the natural world while doing so.
About this quest: This quest will feature books on terrestrial invertebrates and will include topics such as: 🦗 Minibeast natural histories 🐜 Minibeast influence on human history, society, and culture 🦂 The people who study them
Accepted animals: most terrestrial arthropods, annelids, and mollusks. If you would call it a creepy crawly, it can be featured in this quest! Due to their sheer number and human experience with them, the majority of books will be about insects, but I wanted to give other small critters a place to shine, too. Where minibeasts are not the main topic of the book, they’re still featured and are discussed within their ecological context or the author is using them as a focal point in a larger conversation about their life.
This quest includes pop science books, visual guides, photography books, and memoirs. I did my best to make sure the books here are appropriate for a general audience, but some books may feature more technical information. Don’t worry, it all balances out! There are also some books that just have beautiful minibeast photos 🤩
An important note: this quest is not a place for minibeast hatred! Comments or posts encouraging violence against the animals presented are not welcome in this quest forum. Please do not post about "killing it with fire" or advocate for the extinction of entire species. However, please do feel free to discuss your fear or anxiety around these animals! It would be silly not to acknowledge that many people are uncomfortable with or indifferent to them. Ideally, we can start a conversation about these topics!
I’ve chosen to promote works that feature these animals in a positive or neutral light over a negative one. As you'll read in many of these books, a lot of these animals are facing ecological hardships and part of the reason is public disgust and disinterest. While more books featuring minibeasts as pests and disease vectors will eventually be included, they will not be the priority.
Recommendations If you have any suggestions for a nonfiction book that features minibeasts, please feel free to suggest it here!
🐛🐛🐛
With all that out of the way, I hope you all enjoy! Are there any books here you’ve read or any that look particularly interesting? Will you be going straight for the photo books or looking for a more comprehensive text? Are you a fearless bug enthusiast or does the sight of a spider keep you up at night? Do you have a favorite minibeast? I look forward to chatting with everyone!
48dorouu joined a quest
Fictional(?) Dystopian Societies ✊🏛️🆘
🏆 // 567 joined
Not Joined
If you think real world societies are bad (you'd be right)... get a load of *these.*
0dorouu commented on dorouu's update
dorouu commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
What are your favorite pink covers that aren't valentines themed? I seem to have gotten a lot lately .
34dorouu commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
Space Opera is my favorite type of Science Fiction. I have read a lot of it over the years. Something about the scope and the characters just hooks me. My favorite one of all time is The Expanse series by James S.A. Corey. I was so invested in those characters by the time I got to book 9 that I was almost afraid to read it. I bought it on the first day it was out and plowed right through it. I got a little teary eyes when it was over knowing that I would probably never see any of those characters again (well except for in a reread). I am currently working my way through the Culture series by Iain M. Banks. I like it for a completely different reason (since most characters don’t repeat). I think for that one it is the scope and the writing. The first space opera I ever read was The Lensman series by EE Doc Smith. I read it in 7th grade and it completely captured my imagination and I was off and running.
What are some of your favorite classic or new space operas? Is there a particular reason you love them?
28dorouu wrote a review...
The first third of the book: Grumpy was too grumpy to the point of abuse Sunshine was too sunny to the point of accepting abuse (not from MMC but still).
She's also such a cute, ditzy, clutz that she is constantly late and also makes adorable mistakes like mixing the meds of her patients! /s 😍 just in the beginning tho.
The book does get better tho??????? I also found the medical bits inaccurate. The author definitely took some artistic liberties in what Ray was and wasn't capable of lol. Anything for the plot and the bondage! Which btw, came out of left field like BAM! Let's just skip past prior discussion and consent, I guess?
FMC and MMC are like completely different people by the end it's kind of unbelievable. I wasn't a huge fan of the characters or the plot, talk about a workplace ethical nightmare. But admittedly, there were some lines in there that made me ☺️ awee.
0dorouu wrote a review...
Men are disgusting🚮
🛑please note before reading that I mostly talk about men in this review, even though there are some women who perpetrate these crimes. It's still like 99% men though, so I'm just gonna say men.
Laura Bates is no stranger to researching how men continue to be horrible in various corners and aspects of society. In this book, she specifically delves into how men have utilized technology to satisfy their whims, as well as developed technology for their own wants and desires- while disregarding the well-being and safety of anyone else. This results in a world where young girls and women, especially WOC, are violently harmed, traumatized long-term, pushed to the side, and shamed. She describes a world in which technology caters to men first, and only make adjustments after people are harmed. One apt comparison she makes is that we would never treat food services the same way a la "oh a large group of people might get sick, but the main customer base won't so just release the moldy bread" (not an excerpt, just my thoughts). These giant tech corporations have the funds, and the man power, to research and put in safeguards to protect children and women. They just choose not to, and instead prioritize profit and capital. (shakes fist at late-stage capitalism). Each chapter discusses one way that men utilize technology in ways that ultimately harm women. One discusses deepfake content created without the consent of the women/girls who are the subjects. Another discusses the harassment of women/girls in digital spaces such as the metaverse. Others describe the use of sex robots, chatbot girlfriends, and revenge porn.
Within these chapters, Bates makes an argument against the idea that all of these new solutions let men "explore" violent desires and fetishes such as pedophilia, keeping them away from real human victims. These companies will even co-opt liberal language, saying that it helps struggling men. Bates posits that in actuality, these tendencies tend to bleed into real life- leading the men who participate in them digitally, to want to perpetrate the crimes in reality. This should terrify all of us.
Unfortunately, Bates' argument starts to fizzle out towards the end. Rather than remaining critical of AI technologies, she writes that we should continue to develop and utilize it. We just have to be "safer" about it. And I can see that if you are only looking at currently technology through the lens of this book and perspective, it seems like adding safeguards is all that's necessary. However, there is a blanket disregard for any other critiques of emerging technologies outside of sexism. There is no conversation about the environmental impact. No mention of data privacy concerns outside of non-consensual sharing of images or videos by men. What about the fact that these tech corporations have these images and videos stored??? What about the data they can glean about us from them?? Rather than doing research in how the technology works, Bates often describes the way that she experienced them. When discussing AI hallucinations, she describes how she asks the AI questions and how she discovers the replies were confidently wrong. But she still treats these AI chatbots as if they are human, referring to them with (she/her) pronouns, and even describing how the chatbot feels.
While she does bring up examples of positive things that AI in the field of science has helped accomplish-- I think it would have been very easy for her to differentiate that AI can be used for pattern recognition and algorithms that don't use any data that might contain human bias (cause AI fed biased data becomes... Biased!). AI for detecting bread being used for skin= great! AI to detect patterns in space= great!! AI to determine recidivism rates= bad! AI used to determine healthcare plans= bad!! She mentions these examples, but is unable to draw a clear line between them. She also admits to using ChatGPT for research in the book, and claims we should use chatbots to police chatbots, which floored me.
Ultimately, the first three quarters of the book offered a lot of information and was a difficult but necessary read. The last quarter fell a little short and I think she should have left a lot of it out and stuck with the focused theme of the book.
0dorouu finished a book
The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny
Laura Bates
0dorouu commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
It is Wednesday my dudes👋🏻
It’s time for Who’s Who Wednesday where every Wednesday we introduce ourselves and make new friends. This is possibly part 16.
Jadelovesbooks originally started this. These were some of my favorite posts to read through so I'd like to bring it back if that's cool (or if these were ended on purpose, let me know and I'll remove this).
If you participated in any of the times before, you don’t have to introduce yourself again but you can share some different facts about you, an opinion you have, or how your week is going.
If you’re new, introduce yourself!
I’ll go first.
My name is Wibbily. I have a 25-year-old scar on my left arm from when the family cat scratched me as a kid (not her fault, she got spooked while sitting in my lap and scratched me by accident).
269dorouu commented on dorouu's update
dorouu is interested in reading...
Sky Daddy
Kate Folk
6Post from the The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny forum
Post from the The New Age of Sexism: How AI and Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny forum
dorouu commented on breathewildly's update
breathewildly DNF'd a book
Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil
Victoria Schwab
5dorouu is interested in reading...
Sky Daddy
Kate Folk
6dorouu commented on a post
dorouu commented on a post from the Pagebound Club forum
Love this book so much! Catching up on marking the books here as I just started exploring pagebound!
5