I was really vibing for a couple days until current events crashed in to ruin my mood. It’s not that there isn’t good reason to be upset. But I think I need to use these things as opportunities to practice good mental hygiene. Getting sucked into “it’s fair to be upset” things happening in the world is part of the reason I bottomed out so hard in 2020.

There will always be lots of reasons to be unhappy, and I have to make sure to process them as healthily as possible. I was up randomly at 3am brooding and then began brooding again the instant I woke up at 7. Now 1.5 hours into brooding about it. A reasonable length of time? I don’t think “reasonable” applies. But I have had Thoughts about it, and now my Thoughts suggest it’s time to turn back to my tangible life.

(It’s not cruel to “turn off” to the world; it’s conserving emotional energy for when it’s my turn to *need* it.)

I really really need to watch out for News Mood Swamps as we approach America’s next presidential election.

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Yesterday’s crochet time was spent on what I’m calling “the installation” rather playfully. I crocheted a bunch of handbags in a frenzy, and now I’m making an art installation in my stairway to display all the bags. I’ve integrated a Very Big Stick and some organic elements that unite Stick and Bags and it’s coming along slowly. But it’s nice. I think it will end up looking like an abstract crochet handbag rain forest.

My 9yo told me it was really cool that I was turning part of our house into “the art museum” (we visited recently) and 13yo has barely blinked because this is just the kind of shit mommy does.

I’m going to figure out how to light it too. And THEN I will take photos of everything to share with you guys.

I guess that’s the entirety of the project for me. An organic growing art-thing in my hallway, which I will then document after the fact like someone who discovered it, and then I will probably disassemble it because it’s getting dusty and put everything in a labeled bin. “My entire 2023.”

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While I was looking for things to watch yesterday, I realized I had watched The Christmas Prince 2: Royal Wedding without logging it on Letterboxd, writing a review, or even remembering it until that moment. If I write a review, I’ll bundle it with the third movie, because it was so forgettable that it’s not going to be worth more than a paragraph or two.

But the tl;dr is that they shouldn’t have tried to venture away from the oppressive blandness of the first movie, because they took about two baby steps and fell flat on their faces being monarchists, plus they wasted most of our time with a boringly executed mystery instead of actual romance or Christmas vibes. Rose McIver deserves better.

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Turns out your push notifications can be “read” by Apple and Google, no matter other privacy settings. If I understand the article on Engadget, this has been known quietly for a long time but the government didn’t want folks to know.

Thing is, I think we “knew” publicly because most apps with any sort of privacy element have an ability to mask push alerts in some way. Alerts on mental health apps I used were always discrete. Not like, “Check in with MYCRAZYPERSON and log your PSYCHIATRIC MELTDOWNS!!!” kind of alerts. Rather, it would say, “Want to check in?”

Partially, that’s to keep people from seeing your alerts when your phone is sitting on the lunch table.

But also, many app developers come from Apple or Google development backgrounds, so they’d know notifs are always “readable” by the companies. Some folks have been protecting us longer than we “knew” we needed protection. I guess that’s the good part?

I disable notifications on everything by default because I don’t want anything to talk to me.

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Andrea Fay Friedman passed away (Variety). She was an actress with Down’s Syndrome, and for many families like mine, she brought representations into our living rooms through the tv show “Life Goes On.” She also provided a voice role to insult Sarah Palin on Family Guy, and kept working through 2019.

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Important news for the adult family members of giggling children: Goat Simulator 3 is on mobile now. (Engadget)

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SAG-AFTRA’s new agreement has been officially ratified. (NPR)

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Colossal reviews a book on surrealist art. I might want this one. I really like Miles Johnston and one of his pieces is included, too.

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A Nevada grand jury indicted some of Trump’s fake electors. Get ’em all outta here. (NPR)

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Tor reviews a biography of Captain Sisko from DS9. Tor dot Com also let me know that three Pixar pandemic-era movies are coming to theaters. I’m still not back in theaters for anything short of a Jordan Peele movie, BUT I loved Luca more than life itself, so I hope this will bring more people to the child-aged mmf paranormal romance. Call Me By Your Fins?

I think I might spend next year writing what kind of Obsession Days I have in my annual planner (I use Hobonichi). Lately I haven’t really remembered what I’m up to in retrospect because I’m getting all swept up in whatever creative pursuits, and if I just wrote “movie day” and “drawing day” and “crochet day” on these entries, I think it would cover a lot of bases.

It would also explain why I’m frowning at my yarn stash, wondering why nothing has gotten crocheted. Honey, you were drawing the last few days. A lot of drawing! And writing movie reviews.

Of course sometimes the Obsession Day is going to be “[insert name of video game here]” and right now it’s Baldur’s Gate III. I keep kinda going back and forth on whether I *love* it or not. It’s obviously an outstanding game. It’s so good. I would not say two negative words about the game as a product overall: it does such a marvelous job bringing the TTRPG feeling to my computer, with incredibly detailed graphics, and in such an optimized way that it runs *really* well on all sorts of systems. I don’t love the story itself, but the complexity of execution is utterly fascinating.

So when I say I’m not sure I love it, it’s entirely personal. I was actually feeling this way about Skyrim (of which I’ve probably played at least 1000 hours) so I don’t think it’s about the game itself. There is something aesthetically or thematically that is frictious to me, but in a way that I’m still very interested and want to explore.

I almost wonder if I’m getting sick of the way video games nonproductively hijack the dopamine pathways of my brain and make time vanish, especially when it’s a game I reeeaaally like, like a fantasy RPG.

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Speaking of drawing, you’ll now find three reviews of mine also have illustrations attached: The House Bunny, Last Holiday, and My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Like I said, I’ve been having a couple drawing days. I’m picking movies kinda arbitrarily based on which heroine I feel like drawing. The aesthetics of movie heroines are really catching my eye lately!

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My favorite read this week was probably Who Gets to Play in Women’s Leagues? on The New Yorker. I’m keyed enough into trans and intersex issues that I caught a whiff of transmisogyny from this, but it’s written by an intersex cis woman talking about her experiences, so I think it’s just a cis person doing her best? The information is good, as far as I can tell, and I haven’t seen such a complete debunking of myths and explanation of science/society behind gender and athletic competition.

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The French TV industry crew is thinking about striking. (Variety)

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A story about nontraditional families stepping up for each other in traditional ways in Korea, focused on a woman adopting her best friend. (AJE)

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I am absolutely fascinated by José Lerma’s heavy impasto, and I lament that these paintings would absolutely not be safe to lick or chew on, for multiple reasons. (Colossal)

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What do you think is the top worldwide box office winner? Hunger Games? Nope, it’s called Animal, out of Bollywood, and starring the talent of Ranbir Kapoor. (Variety)

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Scrolling through some really dark news in my feed, there was also this bit of prose from Only Fragments in the middle. My emotions felt really validated seeing this. Like, hey look, someone with some of the flavor of my mind.

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Queen Latifah, Billy Crystal and others celebrated at Kennedy Center Honors (NPR)

I’m going through a tiny Queen Latifahssaince in my life and I always adore Billy Crystal, so just seeing their faces together makes me happy. <33

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Will nuclear fusion work as an energy source in the imminent future? (NPR) Idk I’ll ask my 13yo. They’ll know.

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Why Indian Buddhism has gardens, not monasteries (Psyche)

I’ve been studying Buddhism here and there while I try to grapple with my mortal body. I also started gardening about the same time. So this is an interesting read for me.

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Ars Technica talks briefly about Star Trek voices in video games. Heh, I played a lotta these.

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Wait, someone watched Halo Season 1? Enough people watched Halo Season 1 for us to get a Halo Season 2? Someone wants this? (Variety)

I’ve been keeping my head down and writing a bit, which calls for supplementary activities that turn off my brain. I’m crocheting a lot. But I’m also playing more video games again because 1) fiction wears me out, 2) my wrists/hands/arms can use rest, and 3) Baldur’s Gate III is a lot of fun.

I like storytelling games as a genre. BGIII makes me think about fantasy combat RPGs like Skyrim, sure, but it also makes me think about Crusader Kings and Dwarf Fortress, which are generative storytelling games first and foremost. The dynamic story elements in BGIII means it’s possible to play out the story in a ridiculous number of different ways. It’s more constrained than my favorites, but there’s enough leeway to echo the vibe.

The higher level of mental rest also means fewer reviews (well, I’m still going daily, but I’d been doing 2-4 for a little while and that’s nuts) and less link spam. I know you understand, void.

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From Publisher’s Weekly: The Scholastic union reached a tentative agreement!

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NPR: Bringing up a baby can be a tough and lonely job. Here’s a solution: alloparents

“Even the most adorable, sweet, easy babies are a ton of work,” says psychologist Kathryn Humphreys at Vanderbilt University.

In Western societies, much of the responsibility often falls to one person. In many instances, that’s the mother, who must muster the patience and sensitivity to care for an infant. And a lot of time she’s working in isolation, says evolutionary anthropologist Gul Deniz Salali, who’s at the University College London. “I just had a baby 9 months ago, and it’s been really lonely.”

“There are these narratives [in Western society], that mothers should just know how to look after children and be able to do it [alone],” says Chaudhary, who’s at Cambridge University.

But human parents probably aren’t psychologically adapted for this isolation, a new study with a group of hunter-gatherers in the Congo suggests. A “mismatch” likely exists between the conditions in which humans evolved to care for babies and the situation many parents find themselves in today, says Salali, who contributed to the study.

Together with a handful of previous studies, this new one suggests that for the vast majority of human history, mothers had a huge amount of help caring for infants – and even a lot of support with toddlers as well.

My kids are being raised by 3+ parents. Three of us live in the house, anyway; they’re also really close with my husband’s parents. The third in-house parent is sibling Rory, who moved in full-time when Little Sunshine was embryonic, and is our agendered tertiary parental unit.

Any human has a right to a full life, and I think that includes Moms of Younger Children. I often benefited from Agendered Tertiary Parental Unit in my twenties, when I needed to do some hot bitch 20-something stuff, because losing agency in pregnancy and breastfeeding made me totally snap. Call it postpartum, call it fomo on the young people experience, call it enjoying the fact I suddenly had money. A support system meant I got to be there for my kids a *lot* but I also got to run off and live my own life a *lot*.

I have just as many memories of going out to concerts with my friends and taking vacations with my spouse as I remember long snuggly weeks chasing toddlers, and I feel really lucky for that. I couldn’t have done it without a community of alloparents, including the one I live with.

I’m definitely not the most present mother in the world, but I’m also far from the least. Nowadays, my availability is a sine wave based on how my cognitive disabilities are going, basically. I am available every day for routine things (bedtime, making meals) and having nice chats, but I’m not the mom who is organizing playdates, structuring activities, etc. That’s really all I have and, frankly, all I want to give. I’m not interested in most traditional Mom Stuff that was expected of the parenting generation immediately before mine.

Sunshine has said that Rory is as good as Mommy; Eldest Moonlight feels Rory is like some very special Gay Yoda who lives in the house and also adores them. I love the very special relationship I have with my kids and I love that they are lucky enough to have close special relationships with other adults who love them too.

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Here’s a bit of Variety puff about Sarah Sherman on SNL. She’s the “body horror comic.”

I’ve been thinking about her a lot because horror hits Gen Z differently than it hit my generation – like, remember how it was dangerous to be a nerd for Boomers and Gen X, but Millennials made nerds cool? Well, Millennials were kinda uneasy with horror as a cultural movement, and Gen Z has made it their Thing. I love it.

I am okay with Sarah Sherman. It’s actually not her gross bits that bother me, but the fact that she sometimes screams straight through other sketches, and she just doesn’t have a lot of dynamic. I personally like comedians who can do dramatic roles as well as comic ones, and it’s still too early in her career to call it. I don’t even know that’s in her interests. Maybe she’ll go in a more technical or production direction?

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Lawyers, Guns, & Money have a good read about Kissinger’s hatred for India and how he was a scummy scumbag, not a pragmatist.

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One of The Weeknd’s songs is doing that thing where it gets a belated TikTok revival (Variety). He has a lot of really good music, Die For You included, but I’m not over the general disappointment of his live concert and that hilariously bad tv show. We’re still on the outs, Mr Tesfaye. Sorry.

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Here’s a review of Bill Watterson’s new book (The New York Review of Books) which spoils it so thoroughly, you kinda don’t need to read it, but I’ve got it on order anyway. It sounds like it needs to live with my art books.

If you recognize the name Bill Watterson but aren’t sure why, he’s the legendary elusive hermit artist responsible for Calvin & Hobbes.

Billed by the publishers as a “fable for grown-ups,” The Mysteries is structured like a picture book, slim and square, with a sentence or two on every left-hand page and a single image on the right. The words are spare and, especially at the beginning, seem simple. The time is “long ago,” and the people live in fear of “the Mysteries” that dwell in the woods, “shrouded in mists,” unseen but apparently “everywhere.” Stories are told of them, paintings painted of the sufferings they cause, walls built to keep them out. Finally, “the desperate King” sends his knights out into the forest to hunt down these Mysteries and bring them back.

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A short read about ghostwriters behind the YA and middle grade books of my era from BookRiot.

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I wasn’t planning on reading Liz Cheney’s anything, so I appreciate this Balloon Juice overview of the bits I’d find mildly interesting.

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Ars Technica talks about an innovative geothermal power plant that is…not very far from me. Somewhere northeast ish. Like if I headed out to the farm town where I used to do corn mazes, I might trip over this power plant.

Instead of drilling into a natural hydrothermal system, Fervo dug into rock that is completely dry and effectively created an artificial hot spring by pumping down water that returns to the surface much hotter.

That strategy piggybacks on hydraulic fracturing techniques developed by the oil and gas industry. Fervo drilled two wells that each extended more than 7,000 feet down before turning fully horizontal. It then connected them by fracking, producing cracks in the rock that connected the two boreholes. Water enters one borehole cold and exits the other at a temperature high enough to drive turbines and generate power.

Fervo announced that its experiment had been a success this summer after a monthlong testing period that saw temperatures at the bottom of the boreholes reach 375 degrees Fahrenheit (191 C) and enough water torrenting through the system to produce an estimated 3.5 megawatts of electricity.

It’s cool to hear we’re trying different kinds of energy. Nevada has always been a testing ground for things whether we like it or not, and this is one I like more than usual.

That said, using fracking to connect the shafts sounds scary to me. I don’t think it’s a rational scary? I’m not sure what the risks of fracking can be in other contexts, but I’m sure that this is creeping me out because I’m imagining some Junji Ito scenario where I get shot through these cracked rocks. The hole is mine! It was made for me!

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Deadline reports that Disney is up to the usual garbage where it takes every excuse possible to hoard money, which they especially love doing to writers. Where are the dragonslayers when you need em?

It’s gotten very cold in my world. I would leave the house slightly more if I wasn’t embarrassed to leave in my snuggly pajamas.

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Seeing the limitations of my own reach on social media via traffic to egregious is humbling, to say the least. I don’t share all my posts, and I don’t cross-post to all the websites when I do, so I’m only getting samples of what my visibility is like on social media. The samples aren’t impressive, though.

I keep thinking that little reach of mine is it, end of story, in terms of traffic, unless I decide to advertise stuff or write potentially viral content.

But I completely did not consider search engines as a source of traffic. There it is in my stats. Search traffic.

Of course I do not have my stats configured correctly, so I don’t know what searches are bringing folks here. Are they coming because of movie title searches, maybe? I have been watching an awful lot of movies. I also link to news articles by title sometimes, so that might be a source of traffic, but again…no clue. There’s a real easy way to satiate my curiosity I probably won’t do.

None of these numbers mean anything *tangible* to me, anyway. I’m not monetizing. No ads or sponcon here. I guess if someone performed a statistically near-impossible number of clicks to get traffic from a search engine to this website, then my author website, and then my books that cost money, I could get paid at some point for what I’m doing, but my understanding is That’s Too Much Work And Users Don’t Do That.

These are the mental negotiations I make with myself to convince myself that I blog into a silent void, and the void is important for maintaining the fun of it.

I live in perpetual terror of being perceived.

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The instant I saw the words “gay musical parody of Saw,” (NPR) I ran off to send this article to a queer horror fan friend of mine. I just gotta say…you should DEFINITELY try to be the kind of person who gets queer horror musicals sent to you. What a personal brand. (I get funny animal news and unusual applications for human skulls sent to me, which is also a great person to be.)

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We are to be punished with a sequel to This Is Spinal Tap. (Variety)

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The Doctor who got me into the show briefly for one short binge when Eldest was a baby has come back, and now he works for Disney. (Engadget)

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Ars Technica shared a fun project that allows you to play DOS classics in your browser.

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Here’s an interview that offers an explanation for the Roswell incident (NPR), which is not as compelling as the line drawn between the rise of UFO conspiracy theories and the alt-right’s obsession with America’s so-called deep state.

“The foundation of our modern conspiratorial age in our politics begins in the wake of Watergate with UFOs,” Graff says. “You don’t get January 6th and the big lie in the 2020 election without the foundation of those UFO conspiracies in the ’80s and ’90s.”

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Digby’s Hullaballoo has interesting commentary on the generalized and incredibly personal hostility of Trump followers.

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Book Riot covers the dystopian nightmare mirror universe of a website claiming to offer a right-wing book fair alternative to Scholastic. Because we really needed to get more right-wing than Scholastic.

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I’m going to link this NPR article about bat penises with the warning that it’s about bat penises. There’s diagrams. Detailed discussion of bat sexytimes. If you click on that, you gotta know what you’re getting into. But they describe a kind of mammalian intercourse that is…not familiar to me…and although I sort of regret knowing about it, knowledge is power, or something?

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Lawyers, Guns, & Money tries to understand large language models. It seems they’re not confident in their understanding by the end of it, but I actually feel like this explained things well.

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They really didn’t need a giant storm battering Russia and Ukraine’s coasts, yet there it is. (AJE)

More than half a million people are without power in occupied-Crimea, Russia and Ukraine after a storm in the Black Sea region flooded roads, ripped up trees and took down power lines, according to Russian state media and Ukraine’s Ministry of Energy.

More than 2,000 towns and villages were without electricity on Sunday night and Monday morning in 16 Ukrainian regions, including Odesa, Mykolaiv and inland in Kyiv, as trees were uprooted, power lines snapped and electrical substations failed, leaving almost 150,000 households in the area without electricity, Ukraine’s Energy Ministry said.