robotrabbit

danish (name), any/all prns, 27, south asian villager in the persian gulf / mainly into nonfic academic writings & the occasional treat (monster romances) / 1st person in my bloodline to read yuri

1515 points

0% overlap

My Taste

Reading...

L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema

41%

17%

Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient

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jenniferPagebound

Edited

Lets chat: AI, Mia Ballard, & Sugar

Hi all my lovely supporters of women's wrongs! It seems we've tempted fate with this quest; we are now in the position of evaluating a real life woman's alleged wrongs.

There's been some chatter in this quest forum already about Mia Ballard, author of Sugar (in this quest) and Shy Girl. Here's a quick and very simplified primer for those unaware:

Ballard is a Black poet and indie author. She debuted with Sugar in 2024 to great success, and followed up in 2025 with Shy Girl which earned her a book deal with publisher Hachette. [Editing to add for clarity: Shy Girl was also indie published and very successful; after Shy Girl's success, Hachette made a deal with Ballard to traditionally publish.] A few months ago, the online book space became suspicious of Ballard's writing in Shy Girl specifically and called out many "tells" of AI writing. Booktuber Frankie's shelf outlined their suspicions in a 2hr 40min YouTube video, calling Shy Girl "AI slop". In March 2026, Hachette dropped Ballard and pulled Shy Girl from publication (link to the NYT article here ).

This has stirred much discourse. On one side, people see this as a win for human created art and a vote for keeping AI out of the book space (which we love). On the other side, people warn of ruining authors' careers over AI allegations when AI detection is so flawed. Ballard maintains that she did not write Shy Girl using AI, however she did hire an editor who used AI without her knowledge. There is also the added element of Ballard being a Black debut indie author, and also the first to have a book deal canceled over AI. Some argue the injustice of Ballard taking the fall for this when Hachette is just as responsible for the editing of the work they ultimately published.

Amidst all this discourse, I want to ask you all: how do we feel about Sugar's inclusion in this quest? As someone passionate about keeping AI out of the arts (and the book space in particular), I feel conflicted about having Ballard represented in this list. On the one hand, having a "better safe than sorry" stance against AI in books is reasonable, and I would not want to advocate for the consumption of AI generated novels. On the other hand, Sugar was not accused of being AI generated (there is some suspicion about the cover art, but it's pure speculation--Ballard is adamant she modified it herself off a free image she found online). It is also a sort of poetic irony that this discussion is happening in a quest titled Supporting Women's Wrongs. There's something to be said about the discussion value of including morally grey women.

I'm very curious to hear what you all think, and what you believe should be done about Sugar. Do we keep it in, or do we remove it?

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the first selfie was a hand on the cave wall

by robotrabbit

12 books

prehistorical humans & their companions, all the history between them and you now reaching back

⏳

🪶

🖐️

Bone Rooms: From Scientific Racism to Human Prehistory in Museums

The Invention of Prehistory: Empire, Violence, and Our Obsession with Human Origins

The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

Decolonizing “Prehistory”: Deep Time and Indigenous Knowledges in North America (Archaeology of Indigenous-Colonial Interactions in the Americas)

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10h

Radical Animism: Reading for the End of the World

Jemma Deer

The reckoning of climate change calls for us to fundamentally rethink our notions of human centrality, superiority and power. Drawing on a wide range of modern writers and thinkers – from Freud and Darwin to Latour and Derrida, from Shakespeare and Carroll to Woolf and Kafka – Radical Animism develops a new theory of life for a planet in crisis. In this original and timely work, Jemma Deer reframes our thinking of the Anthropocene with ideas from anthropology, astronomy, deconstruction, evolutionary biology, psychoanalysis, quantum physics and veganism. Through readings that are both inventive and compelling, this book shows how 'literary animism' – the active and transformative life of literature – can open our thinking to the immense power of the non-human world.

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Art History and Class Struggle

Nicos Hadjinicolaou

English, French (translation)

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Bloodied Bodies, Bloody Landscapes: Settler Colonialism in Horror (Indigenous Voices in World Arts and Cultural Expressions)

Laura Hall

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peryton TBR'd a book

The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine

Sophie Strand

A deep exploration of the regenerative and magical secrets of sacred masculinity hidden in familiar myths both ancient and modern • Reveals the restorative fungi archetype of Osiris, the Orphic mysteries as an underground mycelium linking forests and people, how Dionysus teaches us about invasive species and playful sexuality, and the ecology of Jesus as depicted in his nature-focused parables • Liberates Tristan, Merlin, and the Grail legends from the bounds of Campbell’s hero’s journey and invites the masculine into more nuanced, complex ways of dealing with trauma, growth, and self-knowledge Long before the sword-wielding heroes of legend readily cut down forests, slaughtered the old deities, and vanquished their enemies, there were playful gods, animal-headed kings, mischievous lovers, trickster harpists, and vegetal magicians with flowering wands. As eco-feminist scholar Sophie Strand discovered, these wilder, more magical modes of the masculine have always been hidden in plain sight. Sharing the culmination of eight years of research into myth, folklore, and the history of religion, Strand leads us back into the forgotten landscapes and hidden secrets of familiar myths, revealing the beautiful range of the divine masculine, including expressions of male friendship, male intimacy, and male creative collaboration. In discussing Dionysus and Osiris, Strand encourages us to think like an ecosystem instead of like an individual. She connects dying, vegetal gods to the virtuous cycle of composting and decay, highlighting the ways in which mushrooms can restore soil and heal polluted landscapes. Exploring esoteric Christianity, the author celebrates the Gnostic Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas, imagining the ecology that the Rabbi Yeshua would have actually been referencing in his nature-focused parables. Strand frees Tristan, Merlin, and the Grail legends from the bounds of Campbell’s hero’s journey and invites the masculine into more nuanced, complex ways of dealing with trauma, growth, and self-knowledge. Strand reseeds our minds with new visions of male identity and shows how each of us, regardless of gender, can develop a matured ecological empathy and witness a blossoming of sacred masculine powers that are soft, curious, connective, and celebratory.

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Bento's Sketchbook

John Berger

A meditation, in words and images, on the practice of drawing, by the author of Ways of Seeing The seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza—also known as Benedict or Bento de Spinoza—spent the most intense years of his short life writing. He also carried with him a sketchbook. After his sudden death, his friends rescued letters, manuscripts, notes—but no drawings. For years, without knowing what its pages might hold, John Berger has imagined finding Bento’s sketchbook, wanting to see the drawings alongside his surviving words. When one day a friend gave him a beautiful virgin sketchbook, Berger said, “This is Bento’s!” and he began to draw, taking his inspiration from the philosopher’s vision. In this illustrated color book John Berger uses the imaginative space he creates to explore the process of drawing, politics, storytelling and Spinoza’s life and times.

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Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World (Sexual Cultures, 53)

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

Argues that blackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the human Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World breaks open the rancorous debate between black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment. In so doing, Becoming Human demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically antiblackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism. Jackson argues that African diasporic cultural production alters the meaning of being human and engages in imaginative practices of world-building against a history of the bestialization and thingification of blackness—the process of imagining the black person as an empty vessel, a non-being, an ontological zero—and the violent imposition of colonial myths of racial hierarchy. She creatively responds to the animalization of blackness by generating alternative frameworks of thought and relationality that not only disrupt the racialization of the human/animal distinction found in Western science and philosophy but also challenge the epistemic and material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its authority. What emerges is a radically unruly sense of a being, knowing, feeling existence: one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of "the human."

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L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema

Allyson Field

L.A. Creating a New Black Cinema is the first book dedicated to the films and filmmakers of the L.A. Rebellion, a group of African, Caribbean, and African American independent film and video artists that formed at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the 1970s and 1980s. The group—including Charles Burnett, Julie Dash, Haile Gerima, Billy Woodberry, Jamaa Fanaka, and Zeinabu irene Davis—shared a desire to create alternatives to the dominant modes of narrative, style, and practice in American cinema, works that reflected the full complexity of Black experiences. This landmark collection of essays and oral histories examines the creative output of the L.A. Rebellion, contextualizing the group's film practices and offering sustained analyses of the wide range of works, with particular attention to newly discovered films and lesser-known filmmakers. Based on extensive archival work and preservation, this collection includes a complete filmography of the movement, over 100 illustrations (most of which are previously unpublished), and a bibliography of primary and secondary materials. This is an indispensible sourcebook for scholars and enthusiasts, establishing the key role played by the L.A. Rebellion within the histories of cinema, Black visual culture, and postwar art in Los Angeles.

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L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema

Allyson Field

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Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

Mary Ruefle

Over the course of fifteen years, Mary Ruefle delivered a lecture every six months to a group of poetry graduate students. Collected here for the first time, these lectures include "Poetry and the Moon," "Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World," and "Lectures I Will Never Give." Intellectually virtuosic, instructive, and experiential, Madness, Rack, and Honey resists definition, demanding instead an utter—and utterly pleasurable—immersion. Mary Ruefle has published more than a dozen books of poetry, prose, and erasures. She lives in Vermont.

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Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

Mary Ruefle

100%

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Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

Mary Ruefle

100%

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Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

Mary Ruefle

85%

robotrabbit commented on electrikate's review of Wicked Dreams: Fairytales With A Twist

DNF

electrikate

Apr 23, 2026

DNF

Enjoyment: Quality: Characters: Plot:

DNF @ 35%

doc

Let’s be honest. I was reading this because I saw the TW for somnophilia and thought, eh, sleeping beauty retelling? Up my kink-alley. This wasn’t sleeping beauty at all. This was girl gets “kidnapped” for her dads shitty behavior years earlier. One of her 4 abductors is a doctor and uses a combo of propofol and ketamine, along with scopolamine patches. Now, I’m not a medical professional… (i am) There were a lot of questionable medical decisions.

The first 35% has been majority sex scenes. One after the other. With somnophilia related content, I am looking for it to read a certain way. What’s the point otherwise? I want sneaking and confusion and obsessive watching and creeping and… tiptoeing around. I want internal dialogue about what’s going on. Something. They load her up with meds to knock her out and go to pound town. There’s not the finesse I’m personally looking for- like this was decent enough for the 89pgs I read, but I can’t see myself dedicating my brainpower for 260pgs.

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Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures

Mary Ruefle

85%

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