I have such an abusive relationship with my maidenhair fern. If any of my plants were to die forever, and I wouldn’t be even *slightly* sad, it is the maidenhair. Her name is Marion. She basically dies every 2-3 months when I water her a couple days late. Every time, I think, “This is it. This is the time she won’t come back from it.” And then she does.

Anyway, she’s dead this morning. She’ll be back in a week. Fuck that plant. We’ve been doing this for like four years now.

~

I finished editing Fated for Firelizards after a push on Friday, and I’m ready to get it off my plate. I want to do something else now. I’ve gotta work out email garbage, but then I’ll publish the ebook.

I’m all-in on Insomniac Cafe until I’m done with that. It’s been mostly done but unfinished for years. This is the year where I complete things and harvest all my efforts, after all.

Although I keep thinking “I really wanna go smoke a jay,” I can’t deny how much easier it is to get work done when I’m sober-sober. And getting sober-sober is a process of *weeks*. It’s not worth a jay. That was a crutch I felt I needed when I was dealing with a lot more traumatic shit, but the traumatic shit is processed and past, and I gotta do the rest of my life. Yanno?

~

I’m not sure how I’ve watched Voyager all the way through twice in the last couple years, yet I’m still riveted on this, my third watch. I love it so much. Episodes with the most mundane concepts, like Paris getting framed for murder in “Ex Post Facto,” are executed so brilliantly that I just love them.

I’m also rewatching Friends (at least the first season) because it’s much of the inspiration for Insomniac Cafe. I’ve finally gotten older than the Friends — quite a bit so, actually. They turn 30 on the show and I’m 36 now. But they’ve never really seemed younger than me, somehow. I think the 90s fashion and plastic surgery just made them keep coding older a while. Now I’m noticing the age gap more dramatically. They act in ways where I’m like, “Oh gosh, they’re young.” And now I am not — at least, not in the way they are.

Sometimes the aging thing bothers me more than others. I think I’m okay where I am for the moment. More emotional breakdowns to come later, I’m sure. I’m like a constant ball of existential terror.

~

Speaking of breakdowns, the NHS recognizes montelukast as a source of psychiatric problems, (The Guardian) especially in children. Montelukast has been a miracle medicine for me. And I’m not a stable human.

I am usually quite depressed — in the sense that it’s hard to do some routines, I’m usually battling “low” thoughts, I sleep a ton, I don’t have a lot of energy — but on the whole, for me, I’m doing pretty well. So I don’t think montelukast has been a problem for me. Maybe it’s because I’m not a child. It’s still surprising to see how dramatic the adverse symptoms can be for others.

~

How amazing. I’d heard before that orangutans are the most intelligent, human-like of primates, but we’ve now seen an orangutan using medicinal herbs to treat a wound. (AJE)

Scientists saw the Sumatran orangutan named Rakus pluck and chew up leaves of a medicinal plant used by people throughout Southeast Asia to treat pain and inflammation. The adult male then used his fingers to apply the plant juices to an injury on the right cheek. Afterwards, he pressed the chewed plant to cover the open wound like a makeshift bandage.

I will tell anyone who stops to listen that most primates shouldn’t be in zoos, but I especially mean this for orangutans. And this just kinda emphasizes to me that they’re sapient intelligences who should be left free to grow and develop naturally, with dignity, agency, and respect.

Over time, I become more convinced that there is no real human exceptionalism; we’re just more complex and developed than most animals. But elephants mourn, crows use tools, and whales teach each other to attack yachts. There are cultures there. Intelligence. Consciousness.

I have fairly pragmatic attitudes about human use of livestock but I really, really don’t think we respect animals the way we should.

~

WaPo talks hammerhead worms. They pop up as a subject in my gardening groups a lot, and the consensus is generally that you should kill them. Not by cutting. That just helps them multiply.

Ways to kill a hammerhead worm include:

[Y]ou can kill the hammerhead flatworm by dropping it into a container and using one of these methods:

Keeping the container in the direct sun for several hours.
Sprinkling some table salt into the container.
Squirting some hand sanitizer into the container.
Placing the container in a freezer.
Adding soapy water into the container.

Apparently hammerhead worms aren’t *quite* as toxic as my gardening groups report, but try not to touch them too much. And no licking, ya weirdo.

Squirmies and crawlies are also worthy of life and respect, but this is one of the areas where my feelings are pragmatic. Hammerhead worms are invasive in North America. They threaten native life. Drop them in a murder bucket and make it quick, please.

In other agricultural news, the EPA is talking about banning acephate, a pesticide that was banned in the EU twenty years ago. (ProPublica) Yeah, let’s do that.

~

I really enjoyed reading this article about Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron as an anti-comfort movie. Spoilers for the movie ahoy, so I won’t excerpt it, but the message resonates with me. I am still eagerly awaiting it on streaming.

~

I’m done with Airbnb et al, but I do find the property decked out like the X-Men mansion (Variety) to be pretty charming. I’d spend so much time in the danger room.

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Lawyers, Guns, & Money talks about how white people always oppose protest movements.

Regardless of the quality of the strategy or whether this is actually going to work or whatever, none of that matters much to the key point, which is that people oppose ALL forms of protest, no matter how peaceful or how not peaceful.

I truly had no idea that supporting free speech — ESPECIALLY organized protests — was so broadly unpopular among white people (my demographic). That’s just not how I grew up! I grew up with such respect for demonstrations and consider it part of my civic duty.

At first I thought, “Well my family of five is all in favor of protests, so we break the statistic.” Then I had the depressing thought, “That just means there’s three other families of five who all don’t support them.”

~

Why are we still talking about Kristi Noem? (The Guardian) I find this confusing. South Dakota isn’t one of the more influential states in the United States, and I do expect certain rural behaviors from folks in SD — like seeing dogs in a functional way that means you can shoot them if they don’t meet your standards, however unreasonable. We have family who are “shoot the dog who misbehaved” kind of rural-leaning. It’s not uncommon, I’m afraid. Harping on the story isn’t going to change anyone’s mind.

So I get that we sentimental dog lovers had to process the story about puppy Cricket for a while. But now we’re still covering Noem’s other errors and lies when she’s a state-level politician where few Americans live. I think it’s established she’s not going to be Trump’s VP pick. Giving her attention is just, well, giving her attention. It doesn’t seem to actually boost a Democratic position versus Republicans. It seems to just make polarization worse.

Oh, maybe I just explained it for myself. Guess it could also be click-based.

Today I pulled my 9-year-old into my cozy rocking chair (which is super-wide) so we could play a game on my phone together. I haven’t done that in a while. In this house, we all have our own devices. I don’t really like playing games with other people anyway. But it was extremely snuggly today, and I’m always amazed at how quickly he picks things up. He notices stuff I never do. He only needed about 1-2 minutes watching the game to grasp most of the rules.

It was nice snuggling. He’s been sick, so I was limiting contact to limit my own viral load. I think I did get the bug from him a bit. I was achy and exhausted yesterday. We’re both doing better though! So I got to refill my cup on Sunshine snugs.

Meanwhile I have been spending the vast majority of my time with 13yo by going on long walks. I like it because I have a hard time listening to people talk if we are just sitting around talking. Once I start walking, I can hear and absorb everything. I *want* to hear everything they say. It’s so frustrating how normally my attention wanders. This way, we get sun, we get movement, we get a real connection.

I’ve been saying walks are like medicine, because they are. My mental health is garbage if I don’t administer that medicine each day. I’ve noticed a significant impact on my kids too, so if I see they’re not feeling good, it’s time to put on shoes and get out there.

~

I’ve been watching the whole bird flu outbreak in American dairy cows. I took a week or two off buying milk while I waited for the FDA to confirm that there’s no live virus in dairy products, and it’s looking good. (Gizmodo via Quartz) Yesterday they announced their most extensive tests showed no live virus.

That doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods, though.

Bird flu is always a potentially serious threat in part because flu strains native to birds are less familiar to the immune system of humans and other mammals. Right now, these viruses can’t transmit well between people. But the longer that H5N1 is able to linger in cows, the greater the likelihood that some strains will adapt and become better at spreading between mammals, humans included. And the right assortment of mutations could turn a bird flu virus into a deadly and fast-spreading pandemic germ.

This is my main concern at the moment. I’ve been worrying about the Next Pandemic since we still never took the kind of systemic actions we needed against the Last Pandemic (like, broad clean air initiatives). I’ve expected it would be soonish because of climate change. This one comes from dreadful agricultural practices, though. My understanding is that cows got infected because they’ve been fed chicken crap en masse. The dairy farmers hoped this would mean antibiotics and steroids in the chickens doing double duty once they enter the cows, but it actually just made an outbreak.

I’ve had lots of bird flu articles tagged in my RSS reader. A couple other recent articles are not really alarming in regards to humans: Barn cats dying when they got bird flu from raw milk (Ars Technica), and a dolphin previously getting bird flu (Gizmodo).

But Digby’s Hullaballoo noted that it’s likely there’s already a lot of bird flu in human dairy workers. We aren’t testing for it seriously yet.

~

Sorry, I know that subject is grim. But I don’t feel like we should be afraid right now — just watchful. We are little dudes on a big planet. In our society, we are little more influential than cells in a body.

Balancing the grimness of More Pandemics is the fact we are learning a lot in medicine right now. Smithsonian Mag talks about personalized melanoma vaccines. It really seems like cancer tech is moving forward in leaps and bounds.

Plus, patients in the NHS are getting a life-changing drug for sickle cell anemia. (The Guardian)

On a not-medical level, the G7 nations have agreed to (mostly?) stop using coal by 2035. (Smithsonian Mag)

It doesn’t feel like we’re moving forward, but we really are. All the good and bad stuff happens at the same time. It always has.

~

What’s more high-tech dystopia than a drone designed to cover graffiti? (also Gizmodo)

A lot of things, honestly. I’m not talking much about college protests here because I don’t have any particular insights to add, but those are incredibly dystopian.

This article on Balloon Juice has a lot more useful stuff to say than I could muster.

Students wanted to be heard, and taken seriously, and you can do that independently of the ask. And it builds trust in the adminsitration so that if you do need to go to the demonstrators about a safety concern, they are more likely to believe that you have an actual safety concern. Instead of asking them to take an encampment down, can we move you over here where you’re still visible but aren’t blocking an evacuation route. We didn’t like the encampment, but the whole point of the encampment was that we didn’t like it. Not asking them to take it down is a soft way of saying ‘we respect your decision’. Trust has to be earned, and re-earned with every generation of students.

Basically it’s a perspective from a college administrator talking about what administrators can and should be doing about the protests on a very practical level, and none of it involves cops arresting students.

~

On the bright side, that 1864 anti-abortion law in Arizona has already been repealed. (AJE)

I saw lots of coverage of the law’s passage. I kinda hope I will see coverage of its repeal too? I just think folks need to know when the really egregiously bad stuff gets kicked to the curb.

~

If Biden’s administration has its way, cannabis is getting reclassified on the federal level. (NPR)

From the perspective of someone who is generally pro-weed but cannot have a healthy relationship with it:

Anything we can do to rectify the harms of the drug war is good. We need to stop punishing people for use of herb. We especially need to get people out of prisons for cannabis-related offenses.

But there’s probably gonna be a lot of cannabis use disorder for a while as we reclaim our social memory of safe cannabis usage. I won’t be the only person who bakes herself into a stupor, discovers you can get COPD from that, and has to quit the thing. A number thrown around in recovery groups is 1/5: that is to say, 20% of people can’t have a healthy relationship with it. It’s a lot like alcohol. Some folks drink lightly — no big deal — and then there’s people like me, who can overuse anything.

I predict there will be a dramatic spike in cannabis use disorder because it’s often marketed as a wonder drug, totally harmless. Give it a decade or two to start settling down and get treated with proper respect.

~

On a lighter note, a man has lost his emotional support alligator. (The Guardian) Someone let the gator loose while the human was elsewhere.

I just really, really don’t think humans should be keeping alligators as pets on any level. I’m sorry if the dude is sad. I think the gator is probably better off freed, though.

I took my Little Sunshine to the art museum this weekend. Really, my spouse took kiddo to the museum; I came along and spent some time sketching the art while Spouse chased Sunshine around the exhibits. We only spent about an hour in total. Sunshine wasn’t as impressed by the changing exhibit this time as he was last time. I get it: last time, there were some really cool resin structures, wooden sculptures, and a room with videos projected on tumbleweeds. He liked the theme on immigrant heroes too. This time, it was just a lot of old-timey sketches and paintings.

The current exhibit was pleasing to me, though. It’s a lot of art drawn & painted by a man who traveled around Nevada and California around the turn of the 20th century. It’s always really cool to see very-familiar places a centuryish earlier. Some things haven’t changed all that much, though all the towns have grown. It feels especially cool to sketch something sketched by a dude who hasn’t been around in a hundred years. I like his earlier art. I like seeing my Nevada through his eyes.

I wonder if Sunshine will grow to have any Nevada pride. He is in a particularly rebellious little place where he prefers to identify himself by his Italian heritage (which, to him, means his dad’s side of the family). He associates America with a lot of the terrible political stuff that he’s seen in his limited memory, and he doesn’t want to even be Italian-American. Apparently he deliberately misspeaks when doing the Pledge of Allegiance at school too. I recognize a lot of myself in this, of course. One of my middle school teachers shepherded the law requiring we do the pledge in school. I blame(d) it on her. And I spent my school career refusing to do the pledge on account of Free Speech.

Over time, I’ve softened to Nevada, and I have more historic context on America that makes me feel…neutral? Aggressively neutral. It’s taken quite a while to get there. It means I’m much more entertained by an exhibit sentimental to historic Nevada than the 9-year-old clone version of myself.

I loved museums at his age though. I still do! I spent so much time at the state history museum. I’m further from that one now, but I did take my kids to the kids’ science museum a lot, and I’m happy to make the art museum a frequent visit for my little guy. I love watching him grow like this.

~

I spent a while watching a lot of TV, but I’ve mostly dried up on TV shows I need to watch at the moment.

My family lost their enthusiasm for the Greatest Show Ever, Doc Martin, so I’ve taken a break from episode synopses after finishing season 1. It’s always fun rewatching the beginning of a long-running show right after I finished it. I especially can’t resist doing this with Community, where the ending has a different cast and enough years between seasons that they age quite a bit. It’s sorta sad to think that this is going to be less common from this era of television; we just don’t get very-long shows as much anymore.

Lucifer was a much more uneven rewatch. It suffered dramatically when it was cancelled the first time; the truncated season that followed was actively bad. But the other seasons, once it was picked up by Netflix, planned for the shorter seasons and did a lot better. I still find that the switch in tone from its darker, more procedural first season to a family-oriented soap opera by the end just doesn’t suit my tastes. It does have a ridiculously romantic conclusion to the show. It ends superbly and thoroughly.

I’m currently watching Fallout, although I initially gave up on episode 2. It was just so slow. Even the action scenes were slow! But after episode 3ish, the lengths of the episodes get shorter, improving the pacing, so I don’t mind it as much. I’m not fond of most characters. I think I just don’t like this specific flavor of post-apocalyptic milieu, either. It strains credulity in a way that doesn’t make me want to suspend disbelief. That said, I’ve been enjoying all the filthy Ghoul fanfic. I like Walton Goggins! But I’m not remotely attracted to him! Until he’s a disgusting rotten noseless walking corpse doing weird rope bondage and fetish stuff with the young woman avatar, I guess. Monsterlovers win again.

I’ve also been playing tons of Fallout Shelter again (a mobile game where you build and maintain a vault), so it’s kinda fun half-ignoring the show while tormenting my lil vault dwellers. I couldn’t get into any of the other Fallout games, though. The franchise just doesn’t click with me.

~

In news relevant to perhaps only my 9-year-old, legendarily litigious Nintendo went after Valve and Garry’s Mod has to remove 20 years of Nintendo-related content. (Ars Technica)

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Estonia has to close one of its airports for a while because of GPS jamming, which might be coming from Russia. (Lawyers, Guns, & Money)

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Here’s an interesting, in-depth essay about the aesthetics of fascism and the rise of the current fascist movement seen in media. Thanks to Simon McNeil for taking the time to write this out.

I love Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism essay for its clarity, and this author also appreciates it.

Fascism is largely an aesthetic position. “Even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives,” Eco says, and these cultural habits, these obscure instincts and unfathomable drives aren’t a political program exactly, they’re not an ethic nor even an anti-ethic. Rather, as I discussed in my essay on the concept of degeneracy, much of what underpins fascism is a sense of what is beautiful and, more critically, what is ugly. The fascist is, at the root of it all, somebody with an exceptionally powerful revulsion for ugliness and a very specific set of criteria for what makes something ugly.

I appreciate anyone who tries to break down Ur-Fascism a bit because it’s a very dense essay. A lot of the best anarchist reading is challenging, which sucks, but is kind of inevitable. The reasons for arriving at an anarchist position require understanding a lot from history and philosophy. This is one of the great challenges of social reform, in my opinion: the aesthetics of fascism will always be much more accessible and easier to market.

Anyway, there’s a lot more to the post than that, so it’s worth chewing on.

~

Trump is a powerful, virile strongman who cannot possibly sit in a cold courtroom because he’s old and fragile. (Digby’s Hullaballoo) This contradictory behavior is fully in line with the Ur-Fascism essay, if you ever get around to reading it.

Also from Digby: The unions are supporting Biden.

~

Nixon was advised to start monitoring CO2 levels back in 1971. (Ars Technica) We know that didn’t happen. Are you surprised?

~

I haven’t touched on the wave of massive student protests in support of Palestine, but it’s very interesting how it gives me perspective on a lot of contemporary American history. Here’s a bit about current protests from The Guardian. AJE shares photos of historic student protests at American universities.

I grew up only hearing sympathetic narratives surrounding student protesters. Now I’m hearing all the vitriol and activist loathing that fed into brutality against those protesters in modern day. History sure is a lot more nuanced when you’re living it.

~

Unsurprisingly, Idaho is seeing a lot of emergency flights for pregnant people. (NPR)

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The Guardian pins long COVID cases in England and Scotland to about two million people.

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Not cool at all: Grindr shared the HIV status of its members with third-party companies. (Ars Technica) I can’t even begin to put my utter revulsion into words.

~

I’ve been keeping an eyeball on Javier Milei’s rise in Argentina since I started doing these Sara Reads the Feed posts (scroll down the post a bit). The tl;dr is that he’s a bad-haired far-right populist. Massive protests against his austerity measures have felt inevitable, so here are some photos of protests against university cuts from AJE.

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Thank Horus that George Santos dropped his current run for office. (The Guardian) The guilty pleasure of a hilarious sassy gay Republican grifter really does belong in a sitcom, not on the government payroll.

~

Jennifer Aniston is working on a remake for 9 to 5. (Variety) I’m going to remain neutral on this for the moment. It’s not a movie that demands remaking, but the message is sadly just as relevant now, and I support women getting up to shit. I guess I’ll wait to see how it goes.

~

Warm sibling bonds in early adulthood make for better health and happiness as you age. (NPR)

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I really consider this one of the less threatening uses of AI, since it’s so targeted and specific, but… Someone tried to frame a coworker by making an AI generated version of his voice say bad things. (Ars Technica) It’s remarkable because we’ve all seen this coming. And it requires a very low level of technological expertise to do it. Yet it’s also very easy to trace if someone isn’t tech savvy (the dude wasn’t using VPNs and whatnot), and its impacts are extremely local. The environmental damage of AI generation is much further-reaching. That’s not even considering what it does to the labor market or the quality of output it produces.

~

Smithsonian Mag talks about the marriage practices of the ancient Avar empire. This was a society where widows were generally remarried within their husband’s family — like, her husband died, so she remarried his brother.

The Avars, once a nomadic people, migrated from Central Asia to Eastern Europe in the 6th century and conquered significant territories, including parts of present-day Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. At one point, their fearsome empire almost took control of Constantinople. […]

In their analysis, the researchers discovered that Avar women had more diverse DNA backgrounds than men. They also found that while men were buried with their mothers and fathers, women’s parents were not found in the same cemeteries.

This leads the experts to believe that Avar culture practiced patrilocality, in which women leave their communities after marriage and relocate with or near their new husband’s community. The study also shows that women shared a “steppe” genetic ancestry (where the Avars originated), meaning they were likely not part of a conquered people.

~

Apparently the MCU isn’t having a hard time because it’s movies sucks, but because the kids don’t support them properly. (Variety) Yeah okay lmao.

~

The Guardian shares award-winning crab jokes. lol irl.

Also from The Guardian: Giant pandas are getting a residency at the San Diego Zoo! Americans looove it when China lets us borrow pandas. We love pandas.