Lately I’ve been reflecting on how many people are dying from covid and how cool we are with that (“we” being a nation). I’m in the group still masking because I’d rather not get any of the ambient illnesses, or spread them to people even more vulnerable than me, but people are really Done With It.

Folks have *zero* interest in remembering the pandemic occurred, much less that the ongoing impact is a level of death and disability we should absolutely not accept, but the machine keeps going on.

More blood for the blood god!

Has it actually been like this my whole life? Like, this feeling that things are happening that should definitely make us stop and reflect as a nation, but everyone moved on willfully? And the difference now is that I didn’t get pulled along this time because I’m more aware, older, more vulnerable to long-term health impacts…?

The news continues, anyway, and so do we.

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As a side note, there are a lot of Deals going on for Black Friday, and I’m repulsed by the whole thing so we’re not looking at sales. But I will remind you that any sale costs too much money if you don’t need the thing. Overwhelmingly, you do not need the thing. (I’m speaking to myself.)

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A major app (Engadget) using a word like “rizz” means that this probably died as slang six months ago.

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Variety: Timothée Chalamet: ‘If You Would’ve Told Me When I Was 12’ That I’d Be Starring in ‘Wonka,’ I Would’ve Said ‘You’re Lying’

Sorry Tim, the world is not kind enough to lie about something this horrible.

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Psyche: What is it about film and TV antiheroes that’s so captivating?

Our research seems to suggest that people want to know why immoral people do what they do. They want to know what makes bad people bad.

I have so many thinky thoughts about this, it might be a post later.

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Immigration conditions in America appear to be inhumane in a new way.

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Starfield got a big update. I found it not-very-playable on launch day, so this is nice. I’m sure I’ll be playing it very heavily modded in a few months.

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On Lawyers Guns & Money, I learned that Peter Thiel fundamentally misunderstands Tolkien, Lord of the Rings, and elves.

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The New Yorker: The Next Power Plant is on the Roof and in the Basement

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Uhh. Are we still using the words “reverse harem”? Are we uh…committing to that one? Like, are we SURE?

Here’s a read from Stitch about it, mentioning how orientalist the whole “harem” romance genre is

And if we’re going to be honest: the harem genre in romance pulls from the harem romance in Japanese manga but also, the idea of ~the harem~ comes from orientalist fantasies about the ~Middle East~ that were popularized around the Victorian Era that built eroticism atop the harem in a super exotifying and definitely racist way.

So a) this subgenre needs a name change, and b) this is all Queen Victoria’s fault.

Obviously.

The main thrust of the point is how hetero the genre manages to be, but as a queerbo, I don’t mind ignoring the hets. I do it all the time.

Apple updated my iPad and suddenly my bluetooth keyboard isn’t working on it. Nooooo. That’s how I’ve been writing while sitting down lately, so I guess I need to dust off my laptop and actually use it as a laptop? Argh.

I had wanted to try blogging from there this morning, and yet.

So here we are again, at my standing desk.

I’m thinking of using my VR headset to function as a sitting monitor when I hurt too much to stand, without having to convert my desk back to a sitting desk, but it’s an older unit and the resolution isn’t great for text. Not that it extremely bothers me; it’s just an aesthetic for cyberpunk more than writing fantasy.

I’ve got options I GUESS.

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Truly it amazes me that the reason I can do so much crochet, movie-watching, and drawing is because I normally do *absolutely nothing* with my day. Spending a weekend chatting with family, going to an art museum, playing games with my kiddo, and all the usual Actually Living Life stuff takes so?? much?? time???

I mean, normally I do spend substantial time with my kids every day. …sometimes in the form of sitting near them and talking while I crochet and draw.

And I do chores too! Usually while listening to material for me to blog about (or stories in general, just to inspire me).

Why is there so little time? Does it *feel* like there’s so little time because I’m just always stoned so that the hours melt pleasantly into one another, and I never really feel the need to look at the clock, and the rhythm of the days is the pulsing heartbeat of my life?

Maybe it’s just being in my thirties now.

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Who wants to read the feed?

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NPR describes a dream job, which is cheese tasting. I bet my kids could do this with a little training. They have extremely sensitive palates, and we haven’t done much to discourage them from being selective. They can reject food that is only very slightly off at the slightest whiff. It would be nice if they could make money off their ability to tell me what’s wrong with every bite.

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Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns, & Money talks about the intersection of labor and colonization.

One thing we that underemphasize when we talk about the connections between colonization and race is that it was really all about labor. As I always tell my students, while today we focus on slavery and its legacies as about racism, the reality is that the entire point was to create a stable labor force and that continued well after slavery ended, at least in the American South. […] From New York down to Argentina, the singular point of colonization was to force labor to work in order to make Europeans rich.

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Psyche: As a psychiatrist, I’ve seen how chasing happiness leads to misery

Normally I enjoy the writing on Psyche articles a lot more. This one focuses on a couple of cases by the author, a retired psychiatrist and author.

But this is a subject I’ve been thinking about a bit anyway.

It seems paradoxical that the pursuit of happiness should generate sadness, but happiness is a ghost, and chasing a ghost can never be a satisfying experience.

I have a few Mom Sayings that I like to pull out to broadly explain why life is the way life is, and the most useful recent addition has been, “All the good stuff and bad stuff happens at the same time.” Meaning, no matter how bad things get, there are still going to be kittens chasing jingleballs. And no matter how good things get, you might also have diarrhea at Disneyland.

The kid-friendly examples are unnecessarily cute, but maybe you get my drift. We must simply accept that good and bad stuff happens all the time. We’re going to experience all of it. We have to be present for everything so we don’t miss it.

That is much easier said than done, of course. Presence is a moving target.

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I suppose then that it’s worth discussing The Morality of Having Kids in a Burning, Drowning World (New Yorker).

For my part, I just think you can’t ever predict where life is going. Remember how good and bad happens all at the same time? Even as we battle climate change, good things will happen.

Great people with meaningful lives are born in terrible situations all the time. Sometimes good meaningful lives are brief. That isn’t without value. The moments we spend together have value.

If you want kids, have kids. If you don’t want kids, do your best to avoid it.

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Huffpost: Far-Right Populist Javier Milei Wins Argentina’s Pesidential Runoff Election

If it tells you anything, the man was praised by Trump and also has stupid hair.

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 stupid-haired man wants to screw with education and abortion, so my sympathies to Argentinians. We’re in this together, huh?

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Cyanide & Happiness often feels like it’s throwing nonsense spaghetti at the wall to see if anyone might think it’s funny, but this one is actually funny.

Sometimes I just kinda don’t sleep. I’m more of a Wake Up, Stay Awake person than a Never Fall Asleep person, which is what I’d prefer anyway. It’s not great to be awake at 3:30am because my hips hurt and I can feel my body working on digestion, but I really love passing the eff out because my eyes won’t stay open at 9pm. I don’t know, I just really love it.

I’m tired but Not Tired Enough so I’m sure I’ll do a morning nap in a couple hours.

Meanwhile I’m at my standing desk again, and if I keep writing these posts from my standing desk, they will invariably have intros about my hip/back pain.

Maintenance of this site is a big part of its appeal for me, because I really just love internet puttering. Doing updates is fun. Honing the UI is fun. I’ve had opportunities to launch quite a few personal sites over my life now and I just don’t get tired of it.

Yesterday I noticed that I kept getting fraudulent account signups. I locked comments to accounts only in order to limit my reliance on comment spam filters, and because I’d rather not talk with people than moderate a comment section. But fake emails, I hadn’t done anything to prevent. I nearly broke the whole thing yesterday installing plugins on a live site (lol) but we made it through. So far the new CAPTCHA is stopping bot signups. My obscurity is stopping human signups, but human interaction isn’t always desirable anyway.

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A fascinating read about currency from Noema. The opening salvo about childhood commerce is hilariously relatable, but from the perspective of a world-builder, accounts of historical currency habits is my favorite.

Lydia, a kingdom in modern-day Turkey, created what many historians consider the first coins: lumps of blended gold and silver stamped with a lion. The idea spread to Greece, where people started exchanging their goods for coins in public spaces called agoras. Money soon created alternatives to traditional labor systems. Now, instead of working on a wealthy landowner’s farm for a year in return for food, lodging and clothes, a person could be paid for short-term work. This gave people the freedom to leave a bad job, but also the insecurity of finding employment when they needed it.

Aristotle, for one, wasn’t convinced. He worried that Greeks were losing something important in their pursuit of coins. Suddenly, a person’s wealth wasn’t determined by their labor and ideas but also by their cunning. […]

He wasn’t alone in his distrust of commerce. In mythology, Hermes is both the god of merchants and of thieves. Meanwhile, the Bible tells the story of Jesus overturning the tables of moneychangers and merchants in a Jerusalem temple. In the early days, as is true today, commerce implied exploitation — of natural resources and of other people. (The Incans, on the other hand, built an entire civilization with no money at all, just a complex system of tributes and structured specialization of work.)

I love history framed to affirm my preexisting worldviews. Living in a currency-free post-scarcity society is currently not an issue of resource availability, but politics and logistics. We could handle the latter. The former remains an issue.

That’s also why we can’t have money which expires, but this suggestion from a 19th century economy autodidact did seem to have a clever idea.

Silvio Gesell proposed a radical reformation of the monetary system as we know it. He wanted to make money that decays over time. […] “Only money that goes out of date like a newspaper, rots like potatoes, rusts like iron, evaporates like ether,” Gesell wrote in his seminal work, “The Natural Economic Order,” published in 1915, “is capable of standing the test as an instrument for the exchange of potatoes, newspapers, iron and ether.” […]

In 1898, the Argentine government embarked on a deflationary policy to try to treat its economic ills. As a result, unemployment rose and uncertainty made people hoard their money. The economy ground to a halt. There was plenty of money to go around, Gesell realized. The problem was, it wasn’t going around. He argued that the properties of money — its durability and hoardability — impede its circulation: “When confidence exists, there is money in the market; when confidence is wanting, money withdraws.”

Money hoarding is absolutely an issue. In a fantasy society I developed, I removed any ability to pass wealth between generations of family, which is almost like expiring money on a longer scale. It wouldn’t be as economically stimulating on a short scale. It’s mostly meant to limit the growth of families with more power than others.

I like the expiry thought. You’d have to pair expiration of currency with vigorous regulations to ensure it doesn’t just mean poor people lose their money after a while, as rich people navigate laws required to easily refresh it (like spending money within the family to just circulate it). Money laundering would be so tempting, and it favors those with preexisting connections.

I’m not familiar with the magazine this article comes from, and I like to search for slant when I’m reading something new. Especially if I like it so much. This comes from the Berggruen Institute. Although I’m not going to be going through that wall of text right now, there are a lot of nonsense buzzwords on their Wiki article, and the apparent wealth of the organization makes me super skeptical of their influence. That doesn’t mean the article and/or magazine itself are entirely incredible; I’m just suspicious of any organization involving so much money. I’d take these conjectures more seriously from people who didn’t succeed at our current system.

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Paywalled article here on Washington Post (but if you come across an eight foot wall, you should just search for a 12ft ladder) about the impact of losing affirmative action on two young students’ Ivy hopes: a boy who is white, and a boy who is Black.

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NPR: One woman’s controversial fight to make America accept drug users for who they are

Harm reduction is a big deal and this is a wonderful cause to fight. Addicts are not Just Addicts; they are humans, our neighbors, the person writing this blog post, family members, friends. Although I have never gotten into hard drugs, my fight against alcohol and involvement in mental healthcare has given me nothing but love for addicts.

It is controversial, and I get why. The propaganda surrounding drugs in America is very strong. More than that, America has an incredibly punitive culture. Lots of the country thinks you may as well die if you can’t bootstrap.

Plus, drugs are scary. Losing people to drugs is a horrible tragedy. People aren’t prepared to handle it, much less approach it with open-hearted love, but that’s what we need: radical love for our neighbors. All of them.

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Also NPR: As Democrats stay divided on Israel, Jewish voters face politically uncertain future

What about registered Democrats who believe that all the civilians involved in a conflict on both sides are being absolutely wrecked by a couple awful rich dudes in power? And absolutely nobody can possibly win in this war except for arms dealers and power brokers, which does not mean a win for people anywhere? So we have to start by stopping the war, period, and sorting out our fn priorities as a species? Please put me down as pro-human, anti-war, in every single conflict, no matter how glib it sounds.

Nobody dying in this has chosen the no-win scenario these groups have been locked in for generations. There are a couple people who could choose to stop the killing right now. Normal Folks versus Cruel Tiny Ruling Class are the sides I care about. The Democratic Party is such a massive institution that they couldn’t possibly care what I care about.

(Yesterday I wrote “speaking loudly against such asymmetric warfare seems obvious from where I stand” like symmetric warfare would be any better. Today I’m feeling spicier.)

A ceasefire does not look likely right now.

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I guess I’m only rehashing NPR this morning: As Biden celebrates his birthday, candles on the cake are adding to the problem

I predict that they will replace Kamala Harris as his VP for the second term, but still lean on Joe Biden, and very quietly run on the idea that the VP could take over as president if Biden doesn’t see his 86th birthday. There hasn’t been public talk about the Dem VP, afaik, so I can’t begin to guess who they’d vet; I’m never good at guessing these things. Dreamy philosopher, yes. Smart analyst, no.

I kinda don’t care how old Biden is at this point because it feels like everyone in Washington is as old as he is and it doesn’t matter, they really don’t care about what people want, the system is not designed to give us what we need. I’m just slowly going crazy, don’t mind me.

I’ve been watching Old Animals die the last few years and I notice that natural death has a prodromal period of months or years. Dying of age is a PROCESS. Biden doesn’t look like he’s in prodromal death (falling over is a risk for everyone at this age) so if the doctors give his guts the all-clear, I’d reckon he’s fine. My great-grandma was great until a fall when she was ninety-two years old; my kids’ great-grandparents are still kicking through their nineties and have only started showing the age since maybe 2020.

Is anyone morbidly curious to see what it would look like to have a president die of age in office? What’s the funeral like for that?

I forgot how the day vanishes when I make myself leave the house. I’ve hardly crocheted a thing. A shame, but I went to the Nevada Museum of Art, and that helped reinvigorate me. I felt so creative after seeing such great exhibits.

Do you ever feel like you’ve got no control over what comes out of your mouth? I know I’ve always had a hard time with it, but I’ve gotten worse since I started isolating in the pandemic and continued maintaining it. Going to the museum is one of many efforts to get me out of the house. I’m trying to practice.

But there is my mouth, just saying things like I am a robot, while the little human pilot in my brain screams “Noooo!” ineffectually.

All it takes is saying one thing I meant to keep locked behind my teeth and then I’m a bundle of quiet neuroses all chained up on the inside, terrified I will say something inappropriate again.

I’d rather battle my silly impulses somewhere with interesting art. I took nine-year-old Sunshine and he had fascinating observations. I wouldn’t trade it for a thing. But I would like to go again, maybe alone, and spend a while actually reading the exhibits, and doing some sketching. ~

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Twitter link: Mr. Beast spent a full week buried alive for his latest video. I wish that I did not have any opinions or awareness on this matter, but Sunshine cares, so I care. Vaguely.

If being buried alive for the bleeding cancer that is Mr. Beast’s viral machine is a metaphor, it’s way too on-the-nose. I wouldn’t bother writing that into a book.

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OPB: Washington scientist brings new hope to dying coastal sea star.

Hodin started the captive breeding program at Friday Harbor because he saw a potential solution in the remaining pycnos that demonstrated resilience against the disease.

“We lost somewhere around 90% of the sunflower stars, which is hundreds of millions of animals,” Hodin said. “As horrible as that is, what that suggests is that the ones that didn’t die probably had a little bit of resistance. And if two of those stars breed, we think that their offspring are likely to be even more fit in response to the disease.”

The goal of the program is to raise multiple generations of stars that are more resistant to wasting. Many of the stars will eventually be released into the wild and begin a gradual process of rebuilding their populations.

This is an interesting remedy for a terrible problem. The article is a great read about sea star husbandry, if that kind of thing rustles your jimmies.

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Variety: ‘I’m Loud, I Know How to Organize’: How Women Became the Backbone of the WGA’s Strike Captain Network

Renard was impressed at how much the general public paid attention to Hollywood’s summer of strikes. “I’d tweet, ‘We need water’ and we’d get five deliveries of water just from people who lived in L.A.,” she said.

This strike was successful thanks to the kind of community action we’ll need moving through the next few years of the labor movement…and beyond, I hope.

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Huffpost reports that boat-pummeling orcas won’t be deterred by heavy metal. TBH that usually gets me in more of a smashy mood, too.

I’m still Team Orca, man.

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NBC News: The White House is sending different message to pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel Americans. The letters do not conflict but highlight different parts of Biden’s policies as relevant to each audience.

I know they’re walking a tight rope here. I can wish for better while understanding there might not be better in this situation. Speaking loudly against such asymmetric warfare seems obvious from where I stand, but boy do I stand a long way from the crux of it. I’m doing a lot of reading and trying to learn and understand.

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Ars Technica reports that OpenAI might not be booting Sam Altman, actually. Oops?

I woke up in almost as much pain as yesterday, but at least I figured out what hurt me. Apparently dropping it to the floor and trying to twerk like Megan Thee Stallion without a warmup, or a recent history of exercise, or her glorious butt, is a really good way to flare up old injuries I KNOW THAT I HAVE. Yet I really thought I could do that.

My worry at first was that I was getting sick (the pain was in so many regions, I thought it was inflammation ache), but no…my arms just hurt from vigorous crochet, and I broke my hips because I’m not Megan Thee Stallion, STILL. The hot girl life is brutal. Clearly this means I should twerk on the floor more, not less.

The pain makes it really difficult to work at my standing desk, but at this point, I’ve made it near-impossible to convert from standing to sitting. I make myself sit somewhere else in the house so I’m incapable of hiding in my office for hours at a time.

Still, I might have enough tolerance in these creaky thirty-something hips to get through reading my feed. I did it twice yesterday so it’s only 100-something articles to filter through. Let’s take a look…

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Ars Technica: Globalism vs. the scientific revolution

There’s a new book talking about science which tries to decenter it from Europe.

Poskett waits all of one paragraph before declaring it a “myth” that science’s origin involved figures like Copernicus and Galileo. Instead, he places it not so much elsewhere as nearly everywhere—in astronomical observatories along the Silk Road and in Arabic countries, in catalogs of Western Hemisphere plants by the Aztecs, and in other efforts that were made to record what people had seen of the natural world.

Some of those efforts, as Poskett makes clear, required the organized production of information that we see in modern science. Early astronomical observatories boosted accuracy by constructing enormous buildings structured to enable the measurement of the position of heavenly bodies—hugely expensive projects that often required some form of royal patronage. Records were kept over time and were disseminated to other countries and cultures, another commonality with modern science. Some of this activity dates back all the way to Babylon.

The author of the article seems skeptical that anything before European Science is Actual Science.

His definition of science is even broader (and probably on even weaker ground) when he refers to things like an Aztec herbalism manual as science. Is there any evidence that the herbs it described were effective against the maladies they were used to treat? Finding that out is definitely something science could do. Yet it would require scientific staples like experiments and controls, and there is no indication that the Aztecs ever considered those approaches. Poskett’s choice of using it as an example seems to highlight how organized knowledge on its own isn’t enough to qualify as science.

You heard it here first, guys. If modernish European guys couldn’t rationalize their way through it, then the things the Aztecs knew where wrong. Ok buddy.

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A nuanced review of Alan Wake II from Jessica Conditt on Engadget. I found the first game clunky enough, but I did finish it. I’d rather play a shooter than a mystery game, honestly. Trying to balance the two of them in my head doesn’t sound interesting.

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Emptywheel: Judge Rules Trump Had the Purpose of Inciting Insurrection on January 6.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Wallace’s ruling is that she found, over and over, that Trump’s side did not present evidence to fight the claim of insurrection. Trump’s legal expert, Robert Delahunty (who contributed to some of the most outrageous War on Terror OLC opinions), presented no definition of insurrection that wouldn’t include January 6. Kash Patel presented no evidence to back his claim that Trump intended to call out 10,000 members of the National Guard. Trump presented no evidence that criminal conviction was required before disqualification. There was no evidence presented that Trump did not support the mob’s purpose.

This feels like “no shit” territory, but nothing about the obviousness of Trump’s fascist movement prevented him from reaching the insurrection itself. So. This is why I could never be an actual journalist or fancy legal brain person: I see things with my eyes and I just get annoyed we have to prove the thing we know. Society, man.

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This comic about bouldering from The New Yorker is cute. It accurately catches the effect of picking up a rock climbing hobby, too: you will alarm everyone by trying to climb on a lot of things.

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Al Jazeera: Famed Roma activist Gelu Duminică on challenging stereotypes and changing the dictionary definition of the word ‘gypsy’.

This is one of those racial slurs that a lot of Americans still do not realize is a racial slur.

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Engadget: SpaceX loses another Starship after rocket explodes during test flight.

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Great review of Ijeoma Oluo’s new book, Be a Revolution, from Publisher’s Weekly.

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I’m so glad Iman Vellani has such a healthy attitude toward the box office for The Marvels.

“I don’t want to focus on something that’s not even in my control, because what’s the point? That’s for Bob Iger. [The box office] has nothing to do with me. I’m happy with the finished product, and the people that I care about enjoyed the film.”

I get such Annoying Baby Sister energy from her, and I’m speaking as the Annoying Baby Sister. Her interview with Seth Meyers was adorable.