Off with Their Heads!: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood, by Maria Tatar - This book addresses how fairy tales have been interpreted over time, particularly in terms of how they gradually became primarily for children, and how that led to a didactic approach and a tendency to moralize that are common in literature intended for kids. Tatar comments a fair amount on Bruno Bettelheim, whom I remember studying in college, and his Freudian takes on these tales that often cast kids as the villains, even when they don't really do anything wrong, or are just reacting to circumstances.

Zork: Grand Inquisitor - Hey, I actually finished a Zork game without getting stuck somewhere! This was one of the three point-and-click graphical games that succeeded the original text adventures. I played a fair amount of Return to Zork, and I'm pretty sure I got myself into an unwinnable situation, just as I did with most of the text ones. I took a look at Nemesis, and didn't really like the controls, but I'll probably return to it at some point. Grand Inquisitor is definitely an improvement over Return. It came out four years later, so it's not too much of a surprise that the graphics and video were better and things didn't move as slowly, but it also didn't have the obnoxious feature of the same exact video playing every time you went to certain places.

SPOILERS for all three of the movies we watched this past weekend. Martha Marcy May Marlene - This is a movie Beth put on our to-watch list several years ago, and we only just got around to seeing. Elizabeth Olsen plays a woman who escapes from a cult at the beginning, then goes to live with her sister and her husband in their spacious country house. She does a lot of things that are inappropriate, presumably without meaning to, and imagines that other people she sees are cult members. There are flashbacks to her time with the cult, during which she is ritually raped, told to kill a cat, and made to participate in a burglary where one of the other people kills the homeower.

One myth I heard about recently on an episode of the Let's Talk About Myths, Baby podcast from last year wasn't Greek, but Sumerian. It involves the god Enki, a trickster who is in charge of fresh water. He meets the mother goddess Ninhursag in Dilmun, a place probably on the Persian Gulf, which is often associated with the Garden of Eden, as it's a paradise where there are no predators, disease, or hardship. But it needs fresh water, so Ninhursag asks Enki to provide some, which he does. The two of them have sex, and nine days later she gives birth to Ninsar, a goddess associated with meat, who grows to adulthood in nine days as well.

I usually know when a musical artist I like is putting out new material, due to email lists and all that. Sometimes I miss something entirely, though, and that seems to be the case with everything Nellie McKay put out in the past few years. There isn't that much, but there was an EP in 2019, an album of original material in 2023, and a demo collection from this year. I've now had a chance to listen to all three of them, so here are some thoughts. Bagatelles - This EP is another collection of covers of old songs, mostly fairly light in mood, accompanied by piano or ukulele.

Clockwork Boys, by T. Kingfisher - This is the first book the author wrote in what became known as the World of the White Rat. Part of her goal in writing it was to counteract how paladins often appear in fiction. Caliban, a former paladin in the service of the Dreaming God, is possessed by a demon due to an exorcism gone wrong, and has killed a bunch of people. He joins a group of criminals sent out to investigate the giant mechanical war machines made in Anuket City that have been attacking other lands.

Spellcasting 101: Sorcerers Get All the Girls - This was the first game released by Legend Entertainment, with Steve Meretzky from Infocom as the designer. It's about a young man with an abusive stepfather who goes to wizard school, where he finds himself inexplicably popular and saves the place from catastrophe at the hands of a villain who wants to have it shut down. I definitely thought of a certain children's series by a transphobic author while playing it, although I don't think there's any actual connection. And I'm hardly the first person to mention this.

Christmaker: A Life of John the Baptist, by James F. McGrath - The author attempts to write a biography of John, using various sources and traditions. The criterion of embarrassment, that the early Christian writers probably wouldn't have included details that went against their narrative unless there was a historical reason they couldn't be avoided, comes into play, as the Son of God appearing to be a follower of a different preacher could be controversial. But John was a well-known figure who was considered a necessary part of an account of Jesus.

The Curse of Monkey Island - The third game in the series was also the first not to be designed by Ron Gilbert, who had left the previous installment with a weird ending in which LeChuck was Guybrush's brother, and they both were kids at an amusement park. Since the new designers weren't sure where Gilbert was planning on going with that, they came up with a story that takes this ending into account but still takes place in the exaggerated Caribbean of the previous two games. The amusement park is still there, but it was designed by a still adult and dead LeChuck, who uses the roller coaster to turn guests into skeletal recruits for his army of the undead.

The Green Knight - I chose to watch this on New Year's Eve because I knew the story traditionally starts and ends on New Year's Day. Little did I know it was changed to Christmas Day for the movie, not a major alteration but kind of undermining my thinking. It was directed by a guy named David Lowery, which is confusing as I'm a fan of Camper Van Beethoven and Cracker. I'm sure a lot of people have that name, but it's still weird. I'm not entirely sure what I thought of the film.