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.

~

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.

~

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.

The horrible drive to mess with Egregious seems to have passed. I can tell my dopamine pathways are no longer hijacked by writing, posting, sharing, and checking stats, which is the kind of small-numbers game that my brain can really latch onto. This is a good thing. I have a lot of plates I would like to spin, creatively speaking, and I don’t especially need website stuff booting other stuff out right now. You know?

But I do still wanna post in a low-motivation way, which is exactly the right amount of motivation. If all of my interests are in the zone of motivation where I’m like “I don’t mind doing this, but I could do something else” then I’m really happy.

~

I have been reading the news the last couple days, but not really saving articles to talk about. I haven’t had commentary on mind. Holidays are enough of a change from routine that I’m distracted, even if I have literally not set foot out my front door.

Having family around always helps put things into a more reasonable perspective, somehow. If it’s just me and the news on my computer, I don’t feel like I’m the right scale. A human-sized person worries about life-sized things, like…how’s my sister’s job going? what’s my mom up to? But an internet news-sized person is like, can I please get an update on the preemies who were in Gaza’s Al-Shifa Hospital when the conflict began? why are all systems so corrupt, especially Hollywood and the British Royal Family? why are so many artists so spineless as to support tech billionaires in their whole AI thing? and other things that make my fingers itch for the keyboard.

I only made a couple crochet-related things the last couple days. A sleeve for my kid, a phone purse using leather strips. Both of these were small and not very time intensive (relative to one of my big bags taking 12 hours+ of hooking) so it doesn’t feel like I’ve been doing it at all. My wrists/arms were killing me. The rest is necessary, I think.

So I guess it’s back to blogging for the moment.

~

This article about Flo from Progressive (NYT) is more interesting than I expected. I like reading about the strange trajectories artists’ careers can take. I wouldn’t have expected the actress’s life to intersect so much with the sorta NYC comedy circuit I follow, but it makes sense now that I think about it.

~

It’s not exactly the same as we see in America, but this sad story of a Roma boy killed in a police conflict (AJE) and the following protest actions is familiar.

Very familiar. Tell me if you’ve heard this one before.

In his testimony, the police officer, reportedly said: “I was shouting for him to open the door, so we could check on him, I had taken out my pistol because I didn’t know who was inside the vehicle and if he carried a weapon.

“When I opened the car door, he tried to grab my gun. When I realised his intention, I drew the pistol and then I heard the click, I froze.”

The victim’s brother countered this in an interview with Greek television channel OPEN, claiming the officer hit the window of the car with the gun, pulled Michalopoulos out of the vehicle, kicked him, and then shot him.

This sucks and I hope they get justice.

~

This longer read from The New Yorker about the life of a pre-Columbine school shooter is more interesting than I expected. Parts of it are incredibly difficult. But the siblings’ relationship is fascinating.

Before I could ask Kip about his crimes, he brought them up. It seemed that he had been trying for the past twenty-five years to answer one question: Why, exactly, did he do it? Or, as he put it, “How could I have gotten to this point at fifteen that all these things came together—where my humanity collapsed, and I did this horrific thing to people I loved and to people I didn’t know?”

He mentioned not only his mental illness but also “cultural factors.” Hunting was a popular pastime in Springfield, and guns were part of life in the town, he explained. “It was common in October—deer-hunting season—that seniors would drive to school with their hunting rifles in the back of their truck, just like someone else would pack a cooler for a camping trip. It was very normal.” Kip’s father was not a hunter, but, Kip said, he had owned three guns: a hunting rifle, a pistol he had bought for protection in the sixties or seventies, and a .22 single-shot rifle he had received as a gift when he turned twelve.

“If you would have asked me ten minutes ago if we had any guns in the house, I would have said no,” Kristin said. She had never been interested in guns or hunting. She added, “Mom was very, very anti-violence. I remember she wouldn’t let you play with G.I. Joes. She wouldn’t let us watch Bugs Bunny—it was too violent.”

Kip did not disagree, but, he said, “Dad did take me out when I was pretty young and taught me how to shoot.” He added, “Our parents were wonderful people, but I think we had different experiences in part because of gender.”

[…]

When visiting hours ended, Kristin hugged Kip and left. As we stepped out of the prison, she seemed to be reeling from everything her brother had said. For a while, she was quiet, but as we walked back toward the parking lot she exhaled loudly. “I cannot believe what different childhoods we had,” she said.

I’m not sure that there is a “typical” mass shooter, but it seems atypical for a mass shooter to have schizophrenia in this way. I’ve only heard other motivations. Out of curiosity, I looked it up. According to Columbia University’s Department of Psychiatry, only 5% of shootings are attributed to severe mental illness.

~

NPR reports on a rising issue. Civilian deaths are being dismissed as ‘crisis actors’ in Gaza and Israel

The false accusations have spread on multiple platforms, including X and Facebook, boosted by pro-Israel influencers with large followings. Some of the videos on X carry labels warning they are “presented out of context.” But the false claims have still been widely seen, with one video racking up 5 million views.

Crisis actor narratives have become a standard element of the messy information landscape of catastrophe, from the war in Syria to the Russian invasion of Ukraine to mass shootings in the U.S.

Sometimes, the claim is that a real victim never existed. Other times, behind-the-scenes movie footage or images of unrelated events are presented as proof an incident was staged.

But the intent is the same, Ayad said. “It comes out of a defensive posturing: trying to essentially downplay civilian casualties in conflicts of this nature.”

And that’s why the false claims keep coming. They’re a way of deflecting the horrors of war.

It’s morbidly interesting that we are still getting a ton of this low-tech social engineering as part of the fog of war, and not so much with deepfakes and AI-generated stuff. The latter is out there; it’s just not playing a huge role. War is an ancient business. The froth of misinformation has been well-honed, and we don’t really *need* computers to make it worse, I guess.

The link in that last paragraph is especially interesting to me because I’ve seen one of those AI images around, scrolling quickly past things, and never gave it two thoughts. Usually AI leaps out at me even if I’m just scrolling. Would I have noticed if I actually looked at it? What impact did glancing exposure to the AI-generated image have on my sentiments?

They describe the information environment as “polluted” and it’s wild to get a vague sense of how much I might be exposed to without knowing it. And this goes for all of us. I’m kinda gullible, but probably in an average way. Yikes.

~

Alone Together: An Illustrated Celebration of the Art of Shared Solitude (The Marginalian)

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Cult of the Lamb is getting a free update! (Engadget)

Did you know that humans kinda naturally sleep in two blocks, divided by a wake-up period in the middle? That wake-up period is sometimes called “the watch.” It’s when humans might have refueled the fire, had sex with their partners, use the bathroom, or even written in journals (presumably sitting close to the fire they just fed).

In that context, it’s not so weird that I sleep all split up most of the time. Seldom do I go a day without a midday nap; sometimes I wake up very early and go back to bed until midmorning instead.

If you see me making strange posts in the early morning, I might be in some funky “watch” period of my own. I’m not really awake. I’m kind of asleep. Melatonin might still be sitting on my head. I might have taken something to fall back asleep, but it hasn’t kicked in (or it kicked in and I’m asleep on my feet).

For some reason, I still think I have to share my opinions. It’s up to you whether these watch-hour nonsenseposts mean anything.

~

The nice thing about obscurity is that such posts don’t get read unless I link to them from social media, so I can really put this stuff out there for my own satisfaction and not worry folks might think or respond.

It’s fun checking to see my site’s analytics. Most common referrer is Facebook – perhaps not too surprising, given that I still have a lot of friends over yonder. Twitter is the second-best with about 3/4 the referrals. I wish Bluesky could give me even a fraction of that stuff, but I think I’ve gotten one or two clicks on there, max, despite getting decent on-site engagement.

None of this means anything right now since I don’t have ads or anything on here. I’m still just posting for my own gratification. Numbers are gratifying! I like to poking stuff to see what happens.

~

I have a ton of links in my feed right now, but I’m skimming a ton because I’m avoiding deals and whatnot. I’m just…not doing that this year. So here’s just a couple things I looked at, minimal commentary. Hope you’ve been enjoying time with your family lately.

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Her Hands, My Hands has a round-up of resources that could use help this holiday season.

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I’d been watching articles about the violence in Dublin, waiting to understand everything happening. It’s not good. (NPR) It looks like the tl;dr of a messy situation is that there was a stabbing in Dublin, perpetrated by a “foreign national.” A right-wing element seized on this as an excuse to begin anti-immigration riots. But while the original source of violence may have been foreign, the person who stopped the attack was also an immigrant. (Daily Beast)

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An evocative short piece called “I Am Cascadia” on Only Fragments.

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Digby’s Hullabaloo posted about the birth of a white rhino baby. :^) That’s a rhino baby smiley.

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Deadline reports that Venom 3 is back in production again. GOOD. I need more gay alien shit.

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Do you like the thing that one channel does where they sit actors down with puppies and interview them? Chris Pine did one of those things. (YouTube link)

Boy I watched a lotta movies and wrote a lotta reviews yesterday.

• Last Holiday was my genuine favorite. I cried happy tears and I don’t often do that. (Although I do cry a lot, generally.)
• Single All the Way made me say AWWW out loud a lot and it was almost my favorite. Definitely wins for hottest love interest.
• I truly did not expect to enjoy The Sweetest Thing so much, nor did I expect it to be so raunchy.
• On the other hand, the new movie by Please Don’t Destroy was (warmly) just what I expected.

I don’t know if today is going to be like that because it’s American Thanksgiving.

I’m not sure I’ll actually be doing anything for American Thanksgiving. My in-laws typically cook for the holiday (very kindly) and I’m still not vaccinated for the year. I keep forgetting since I don’t usually leave the house. Since socializing and arguably the worst holiday ever are already not my favorite things, and I have a chronically low sense of obligation to extended family in regards to holidays, I might end up at home with more movies.

I feel sad kinda “skipping” Thanksgiving because it always sticks out as a special day, though, and the years blur together more as I age. I don’t like turkey. I don’t love socializing. The whole pilgrim thing is an offensively silly myth. My kids don’t enjoy it either, so I can’t enjoy them. Why should I feel sad? But I dooooo~

~

It’s good that everyone understands that I’m not the kind of wife/mom who has any interest whatsoever in spending all day preparing an elaborate harvest meal that everyone mostly eats out of habit.

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Variety: Seth Meyers Details ‘Stefon’ Movie That Never Got Made

If they were going to approach it from the random comedy angle, then I’m glad they didn’t do it. Neither Hader nor Meyers (in this article) seem to understand that fans of Stefon didn’t just love him because Hader cracked. A whole lot of us were totally into Stefon hitting on Meyers and the little storyline the two of them played out casually (and! the! wedding!). A Stefon movie should have been a gay romcom about a wild partyboy who’s bad at his job but falls in love with this stuffy anchor type.

Killing Seth off at the beginning is a funny thought but definitely would have made me not care about the movie. James Franco? Oh dear.

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Also from Variety: How Letterboxd Captured Young Moviegoers–and Martin Scorcese

I’m not a young moviegoer anymore, I guess, since I’m President Age, but I’m on Letterboxd and adore it. I can’t say the reason I adore it for the reason everyone else does, but: it’s a site that loves movies but puts the social discoverability secondary, or tertiary, meaning you can pretty much *only* see content from people you care about. It feels like Old Internet and it’s magical. I’ll be here as long as the vibe lasts.

Alsø alsø, Tim Burton says absolutely no revisiting “Nightmare Before Christmas.”

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As a mom who loves her two irl offspring very dearly, this story about Zack & Cody from The Suite Life refusing to tell fatphobic jokes about their TV mom is so cute.

I’d be horrified that they were writing fat jokes about a pregnant actress, but that was pretty standard for the era, I’m afraid.

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Publisher’s Weekly: Workers at Two More B&N Stores Vote to Unionize

Woo hoo!

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Al Jazeera English: Four US-Canada crossings shut after blast at Rainbow bridge checkpoint

US/Canada checkpoints tend to be lowkey nothingburgers, so I was afraid this would turn into security theater.

But a more recent update was less worrying. I guess this was some horrible accident. My condolences to the couple in the car, who didn’t survive, and their family.

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Video from AJE: Who is Dutch far-right politician Geert Wilders?

Ugh. It’s yet another dude leading a localized iteration of the contemporary fascist movement who has stupid hair. From a post I made a few days ago:

I’m not insulting him for having stupid hair, to be clear; I’m saying that the modern fascist movement often has leaders with hair that differs from what is considered business appropriate. Trump’s hair is a distinctive feature, as was Boris Johnson’s.

This is one way that far-right leaders shoot for populist appeal. They aren’t like the guys in the system, so they’ll be able to change it. You can trust them! They have stupid hair!

This particular stupid-haired guy is leaning heavily on Islamophobia for his platform.

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THR: Melissa Barrera Speaks Out After ‘Scream VII’ Firing: ‘I condemn hate’

“I believe a group of people are NOT their leadership, and that no governing body should be above criticism,” Barrera wrote Wednesday — a reference to posts she had written criticizing the Israeli government. “I pray day and night for no more deaths, for no more violence, and for peaceful co-existence. I will continue to speak out for those that need it most and continue to advocate for peace and safety, for human rights and freedom. Silence is not an option for me.”

The initial flutter around her firing was weird, but it feels clearer now that the studio has made a real bad decision.

~

From Psyche, I learned that the adult version of pedagogy is androgogy. Huh.

I’ve been playing a lot of Left 4 Dead 2 at the behest of 9-year-old Sunshine. I played the original on XBox 360 before I was even married to Spousal Unit Zappa, much less pregnant with my second child, so it’s always funny to have this boisterous little gamer ordering me around like I was born yesterday.

To be fair, he’s way better at gaming than me, and approaches it in a wholly different way. I was not a tenth the gamer at his age; I still do not take the time to approach strategy the way he does. Structured games like those in Fortnite and Roblox have set his expectations for how zombie survival games should be played, so he simply expects to spend periods of time setting traps before enemy rushes, timing resources between waves, and other mechanics that have been iterated into future generations of games.

The strategies he deploys are impressive. It’s funny seeing how readily this little guy turns waves of zombies controlled by AI into red mist. He’s been playing a lot of Orange Box classic Team Fortress 2 (apparently popular in his age group because it’s free and cartoony). Playing against actual humans online is always ten thousand times the challenge of playing against bots. His reflexes far outmatch the enemies.

Of course, we lack team cohesion when we’re doing games together. None of us are coordinated in that way. But we’re getting better maybe? We’re practicing.

~

The relentless pleasures of antiquated games filling my Steam library from decades past continues to make me wonder, “Why in the world would I buy anything new ever again?” I’m playing so many games and everything is…old. I feel really happy.

~

If posts from yesterday morning seemed dreadful, it’s because I wrote them with a severe headache. Idk man. I feel better now.

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Yet again, a genre TV show is imperiled, and a fan base must mobilize to save it. Poor Shadow & Bone. Frankly I think the studios expect it at this point. It’s fairly predictable which properties are cult favorites and will cause this reaction. The studios like it. The problem is, if we don’t mobilize to save a show, they really will just kill it. Would it teach them a lesson to stop doing big efforts like this, even though fan energy is being exploited and emotions unnecessarily wrought? Or would we just lose shows we love? I’ve got no answer, but I’m sick of seeing it happen. Just leave our shows to us. Especially you, Netflix.

~

CNBC: Starbucks workers file more labor complaints with NYC as union goes on largest-ever strike

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Originally, I saw this.

One Take News: Melissa Barrera Dropped From ‘Scream VII’ Due To Controversial Comments

I went looking for the specific controversial comments, since it said she cited this article (Jewish Currents) written by “Raz Segal… an associate professor of Holocaust and genocide studies at Stockton University and the endowed professor in the study of modern genocide.” But I couldn’t find the actual words.

PopCrave on X reports that the comments she made were:

“Gaza is currently being treated like a concentration camp. Cornering everyone together, with nowhere to go, no electricity no water…people are still silently watching it all happen. THIS IS GENOCIDE & ETHNIC CLEANSING.”

Then I saw this.

Variety: Spyglass Says Melissa Barrera Was Fired From ‘Scream’ Due to Rhetoric That ‘Flagrantly Crosses the Line Into Hate Speech’

Spyglass Media Group initially declined comment when Variety broke the news that the company had dropped Melissa Barrera from the cast of “Scream 7.” But now the production banner behind the hit horror franchise’s revival is pushing back on a narrative that has quickly coalesced around the decision: that Barrera was fired for showing support for the Palestinian cause. Instead, a spokesperson clarifies that Barrera’s posts were interpreted as antisemitic.

“Spyglass’ stance is unequivocally clear: We have zero tolerance for antisemitism or the incitement of hate in any form, including false references to genocide, ethnic cleansing, Holocaust distortion or anything that flagrantly crosses the line into hate speech,” a Spyglass spokesperson tells Variety.

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Publisher’s Weekly: ACLU, Parents, and Students Sue Alaska School District Over Book Bans

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Book Riot: Project Gutenberg Produced 5000 AI Audiobooks, but How Do They Sound?

The tl;dr is not good. I’ve used screen readers for a variety of reasons, but trying to listen to AI reading fiction (like if I’m getting help proofreading a book) is incredibly difficult to pay attention to. Tools that allow you to tweak an AI voice’s delivery are available. It means investing many hours into “programming” your AI voice, at which point you’ve become an AI shepherd and you might as well have hired someone to do it better naturally.

This stuff just isn’t good for anyone. Leave art to the artists. I love my voice performers.

~

Engadget: OpenAI and Microsoft hit with copyright lawsuit from non-fiction authors

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The Rolling Stones tour is literally sponsored by AARP. (Axios) …Huh. Well, all right.

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Art Technica: The infectious disease forecast for Thanksgiving is looking dicey.

Dammit, I still haven’t gotten out of the house to get vaccinated. I reeeaally gotta do that. I don’t go anywhere so I’m not directly going to catch anything, but higher community rates means it’s easier for my kid to bring things home to me.

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Blackout poetry from Only Fragments that does well capturing the awful frustration of emailing our representatives, who don’t care what we say.

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The New Yorker: Why Can’t We Quit the Morning Show?

Nobody told me the show is as insane as it sounds. Without the CW’s teen soaps, where will I get my insane TV? If I can ever remember to look at Apple TV I might try this. After I remember to watch season 2 of Schmigadoon!