Fellow Primates

subtitle that didn't fit in the subject line: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between

I'm going to say this prominently because I think it has caused some confusion among reviewers: This is a book by two nonbinary authors and the title is Life Isn't Binary, and it is NOT (primarily) about nonbinary gender identity! If you want a book that is primarily about nonbinary gender identity, this book may not give you what you're looking for!

Instead, it is about problems with binary thinking in all areas of life. There is a tendency for people to view many things in terms of two categories in opposition. Male/female and cis/trans, yes, but also Black/white, straight/gay, privileged/marginalized, body/mind, emotion/logic, friend/lover, us/them. The book examines and deconstructs these binaries and more, and encourages thinking about who currently benefits from their resultant flattening of nuance, and what we could gain from framing concepts in a less polarized way.

The book is short but extremely densely packed with ideas. I read it as a two-person book club with dragonque, and every chapter elicited fruitful discussion about its points and how they related to our own lives and experiences. I have known dragonque for a long time and I feel like I got to know them much better through talking about this book!

I do think at times it can feel too dense and too short for the vast scope of its thesis. The authors can state in one sentence an absolutely massive idea that could itself be an entire book, and that's the only thing they say about it because they're already on to the next point. (The authors have in fact collaborated on several other books which sound like they may elaborate on some of the things where I was like, "so, that's all you're going to say about that one? okay!")

But I found the book very worthwhile and thought-provoking, and after returning it to the library I bought my own copy because I expect I will be re-reading it, referring to it, or wanting to lend it to people.

All right, here I'm going to have to concede that my usual strategy for disambiguating game titles has broken down. This post is about a game called 2025 that came out in the year 2025.



It's a puzzle where you're presented with two thousand and twenty-five items that you have to group into 45 categories of 45 items each. This is a much bigger version of the New York Times daily 4x4 categorization puzzle Connections (which you can play on a third party site if you don't want to deal with the NYT), which in turn is inspired by the British quiz show Only Connect.

2025 is not as conceptually difficult as Connections, which goes out of its way to trick you into thinking items go together that don't. I figured out what the 45 categories in 2025 were relatively quickly, and then spent a long time with most of them almost full (40+) and staring at a couple hundred uncategorized items that I had simply never heard of. I was able to guess some of them by what sort of a thing they sounded like they could plausibly be, but I also used a lot of brute force, especially towards the end. Yes, the first category I successfully filled was

spoilers

birds. The last one I filled was legal doctrines, which are very hard to tell apart from mixed drinks and logical fallacies because all three are mostly ridiculous-sounding nonsense phrases.

You can play 2025 for free on the website of its creator, Thomas Colthurst. His whole site is worth looking at if you are fondly nostalgic for '90s era web sites made by geeks of a certain generation who want to share their filk about linear algebra and lists of puns they and their friends came up with on Usenet.

Thanks to lirazel for the recommendation!