It’s warm enough now for me to start putting houseplants outside. The season for doing this safely is rather narrow in my region — just a couple months where I can trust it won’t really freeze overnight. (Probably.)

Normally I’m champing at the bit to get things outside. I always have mealybugs, and sometimes aphids. But I think I’ve got more insect/arachnid life inside my house in general. I’ve been seeing a lot more spiders in particular. Everything mostly sticks to the plants, and it means fewer pests without necessarily more work on my behalf to remove them.

Still, I should get some stuff outside. They fare the winter indoors much better when they’ve had summer sun and water from my stream bolstering their strength for a couple months. At least my bird of paradise deserves more sunlight; I might try to get my bigundo African milk tree euphorbia out there too.

Tbh the Big Guys mostly wanna go out, and I’m kinda not keen on lifting them, heh.

~

Spotify announced that “Stargirl” from Lana del Rey and The Weeknd hit a billion streams, which is a first for any interlude. This is notable to me because it was basically the first song I latched onto from the album many years ago. I remember telling my friends it was my fav off the album and playing it for them, and the reaction was, “…Okay?” I feel so validated now.

I always like interstitials from albums — they tend to be more emotional, sometimes orchestral, and more to my taste. They’re just never long enough. Not sure if it’s possible to capture what tends to be so delicious about these interludes if you add a couple more minutes onto them, but I must believe it is.

~

I’m really looking forward to Bruce Timm’s next Batman tv show. (EW) Like many 90s kids, I love(d) Batman the Animated Series. He’s doing a bit of something different with the new one: a darker Harley Quinn, a less-Bruce Batman, a classic Catwoman costume, and making a few characters nonwhite.

The Harley change is most interesting, probably. But I note that they’ve made Gordon a Black man now. This follows a trend where movies/tv make cops Black people. It always feels off-tune to me.

There are certainly plenty of nonwhite American cops, but our police force come directly from a history of finding enslaved people who escaped. (The Harvard Gazette) The same article says that “Black men are 5.9 times as likely to be incarcerated as white men and Hispanic men are 3.1 times as likely,” and “Black and Latinx people were less likely to have their cases resolved through pretrial probation ­— a way to dismiss charges if the accused meet certain conditions — and receive much longer sentences than their white counterparts.”

Point being, the system is oriented toward white supremacy; it feels perverse to make Black folks the fictional face of fictional police. But movies/tv do it again and again. It seems like people want to be able to say “THESE ones are the good guys” without actually taking any responsibility for unpacking issues at the heart of American policing. I always ask myself, why does cop media get to benefit from the aesthetics of policing/detective noir/etc without any of the responsibility?

This is a bigger issue about anything in the genre. I’ve written police-genre stuff that is plenty flawed in its own ways. I just feel very attached to Bruce Timm Batman, so this one has me especially reflective now, with my changed and grown perspective.

Of course the cartoon may surprise me. BtAS was always more complicated than its contemporary peers.

~

M Gould Hawke, an âpihtawikosisân (Métis-Cree) writer, wrote an interesting post about how anarchists have never been unified on a stance irt Israel and Palestine. This blog directly quotes many anarchists throughout the last century-ish.

The more I study anarchism, the more I see how anarchist individuals are just that: extremely individual. There is far less sectarianism than you might expect in major political orientations.

Hence, whenever I think, “If ABC has anarchist leanings, and DEF does too, then they surely agree on XYZ” — that is quite likely to be wrong. Individualism has strong meanings when associated with anarchy. Trying to find an article to cite with this thought was basically impossible, because I found hundreds of articles about individualism irt anarchy and they all had different things to say.

I guess I should have seen that coming, haha.

~

Lawyers, Guns, & Money noted that we don’t seem to have learned anything from COVID in relation to work conditions. If bird flu becomes a major concern in the USA, dairy workers will be the initial vector, and we’re not testing/tracking them. (The Guardian)

I’m not getting into bird flu much today though. I’m thinking more about the conjunction between changing climate and disease.

Smithsonian Mag posted an article about how declining biodiversity feeds into disease.

Researchers aimed to avoid a human-centric approach to their analysis, considering also how plants and animals would be at risk from pathogens. Their conclusions showed that four of the examined factors—climate change, chemical pollution, the introduction of non-native species to new areas and biodiversity loss—all increased the likelihood of spreading disease, with the latter having the most significant impact.

Disease and mortality were nearly nine times higher in areas of the world where human activity has decreased biodiversity, compared to the levels expected by Earth’s natural variation in biodiversity, per the Washington Post.

Scientists hypothesize this finding could be explained by the “dilution effect”: the idea that pathogens and parasites evolve to thrive in the most common species, so the loss of rarer creatures makes infection more likely.

I predict we’re going to hear more about biodiversity specifically in the coming years. Climate change is quite politicized as a subject; activists must look for other ways to motivate change without touching inflamed nerves as quickly.

I say this because I’m starting to see more articles about biodiversity in general. Chris Armstrong at Crooked Timber just noted that legislating irt biodiversity loss has failed so far. (As usual, don’t bother reading the comments.) AJE highlighted struggles over Jilobi Forest as a “biodiversity hotspot” specifically. The Guardian has been looking at limited biodiversity in England and Wales’s national parks. And so on.

Tangentially related: It’s worth noting that USDA hardiness zones changed in the last couple years. The biodiversity increases possible in your own back yard might surprise you compared to, say, a decade ago. It’s kind of exciting for gardeners (my area is warmer in the winter, hence needing fewer cold hardy plants) if not for the environment.

~

Fights for labor rights around the globe continue. Employees of Vatican Museums are demanding better treatment, (The Guardian) and I wish the best for them.

Apple retail employees are also looking at striking in Maryland. (Quartz)

~

Solar maximum hasn’t caused as many obvious infrastructural problems as it seemed it might. But you know who is getting hit? Farmers relying on precision GPS. (Engadget)

The weather is doing that Nevada Springtime Thing where it’s vacillating between hot and cold. This is so rough on me. I’m alive when it’s hot and I’m dead when it’s cold. When it gets hot then warm, my body registers it as cold. Fifty degrees feels totally different depending on whether I’m on the way up or down. Fifty degrees isn’t cold! Unless it was seventy degrees a couple days ago.

I’ve been getting out to walk irregularly, at weird times. Today was the first time I did my regular-ish morning walk like a normal warm day. I think it’s only going to get warmer from here, but you really never know with Nevada.

~

I’m trying out a new mass email provider. Being able to contact readers about new books is essential, and mailing lists tend to be the backbone of publishing, no matter how old-timey it feels. I mean, emails? BookTok is all anyone has wanted to talk about for a while. Maybe looping people into Patreon. But just straight emails?

It works for a lot of people quite reliably. It has always *kinda* worked for me. I don’t know if the issue has been writing my emails badly, or my domain being disliked by providers, or if the emails I have just aren’t great quality. I made most of my sell-through on books starting in with freebies. Freebie readers tend to have totally different patterns than those who will buy books at full price.

My new email provider doesn’t seem to have improved anything over my last ones (deliverability, open/click rate), but at least I have one again. I lost the old guy because I didn’t send any emails in way too long. Getting things back together has been…not fabulous.

Anyway, I’ve had no pleasant surprises with this release, but it’s still a release. I’m still always grateful that any number of people read my books at all. Period. It doesn’t feel real?

I’m doing all the stuff I can control, that I’m also willing to do. I’m not going back on Patreon or learning Kickstarter any time soon. I seem to have lost the hunger that used to motivate me to do insane backflips to pull something resembling success out my butt. That’s probably for the best. Learning to temper my rather extreme personality kinda means learning not to care about anything so much.

~

Onto reading the news.

~

Readers Take Denver (a publishing conference for readers) was such a disaster that it hit mainstream-ish news. Here’s the NYPost calling it the Fyre Festival of Books.

I didn’t pay a lot of attention like this because I’m the hermit kind of author, not the conference kind of author, but enormous anger radiated through the spaces to which I am still tangential.

~

The outlook for Tiktok in the USA isn’t good. Our government wants to ban it if the owner doesn’t sell to Americans. ByteDance is suing (The Guardian), but time will tell if that’s effective.

In the meantime, Substack is trying to coax creators over. (Engadget) You know, Substack? With the Nazis? (The Atlantic)

Nowhere is perfect. But I wish we’d have a resurgence in creatives simply self-hosting content. Discoverability is a challenge, but…isn’t it always?

~

Various states are arresting student protesting against the attack on Palestine. Quite a few of the students have accepted this. (NPR)

Cornell University doctoral student Momodou Taal was suspended for participating in a pro-Palestinian encampment.

“The school has deemed that my activity or my participation on campus is a threat somehow,” Taal said.

Taal was never arrested, but his involvement with a pro-Palestinian team negotiating with Cornell University administrators got him suspended, he said.

He is now in a fairly unique position.Taal is a British student, and a suspension could lead to him losing his international student visa.

“Fundamentally, I risked all that I’ve risked so far for what I believe is a just cause, and that’s the Palestinian cause,” Taal said.

Some teachers are getting arrested along with their students. At that point, it’s turning into a class for everyone involved. (DMagazine)

This isn’t going to be the first generation of students with activist arrest records.

But arrests aren’t even required. An encampment developed on Trinity College, (The Guardian) and the college committed to divesting from Israel. The protesters dispersed peacefully. There are other ways to do this.

~

Quanta Magazine talks about intelligence in insects. I also recently linked an article about plants having some kind of intelligence. (NPR)

I’ve always thought there’s likely more consciousness/intelligence in the living world than we’re willing to accept. My assumption is that this is for practical purposes. We’re empathetic, social creatures. If we really believed that everything had some kind of mind — maybe a soul — like we do, would we be able to end those lives as easily? on the scale required to support human civilizations? Is dismissiveness about coping?

I don’t think it’s all about the empathy, though. Colonial cultures and religions just want to think that they are above other things, and that they have a right — nay, the divine obligation — to destroy things that are lesser. That’s probably why the idea of insect and plant intelligence won’t ever get more than fringe traction.

Maybe if science keeps pulling out cool discoveries, like the fact whales seem to have a phonetic language (Smithsonian Mag), attitudes will shift somewhat.

~

I feel like I’m always reading about cool archaeological finds in random UK places. (The Guardian) All I get to dig out of my garden is stray cat shit. I’m not jealous, you are.

~

Are you sane? Oops, I misspelled that. Are you a sriracha fan? We’re looking forward to a shortage thanks to climate change. (WaPo) Or a “severe drought.” Depends on how you read it.

~

There’s an upcoming movie called “Humanist Vampire Seeks Suicidal Person.” The title alone has my attention, but there are more details at The Film Stage.

~

Roblox continues intensifying its ad efforts — here with a Netflix team up. (Engadget) Nonetheless, their stock has fallen some twenty percent lately. (Quartz)

Meanwhile, users like my kids are getting increasingly annoyed and disinterested. But maybe Roblox doesn’t care about my kids anyway. They’re starting to age out of Roblox (at thirteen and nine), and games for kids do have a limited lifespan. Maybe Roblox is betting they can catch the next generation of toddlers before they learn to care about being inundated with ads. According to the Quartz ad, daily active users have increased 17% regardless.

Today I hit publish on my first book of 2024, and my first book since 2022 (or 2021? it’s been a while).

It’s all very familiar to me. I did it so many times during the “growth phase” of my career, which spanned seven years or so. The amount of times I did it waned for a couple years, then dropped off entirely.

I began publishing in 2011.

There have been a lot of updates and improvements to general infrastructure since the last time I did it. The process is easier and more streamlined than ever.

Now I need to turn to the next book I’ll be publishing.

More about this later.

~

If I allow myself to spend time relaxing, having fun, hanging out with family, and (especially important) babying myself when I’m sick, then I have so much less time to work.

I used to work so much. It’s hard to reconcile how little time I spent on not-work things in the past.

The only way I can get multiple books out in a single year is by making significant cutbacks on other things I’ve come to enjoy.

I used to say that I had a blue collar work ethic, but I really, really don’t have that anymore. I’d just…rather sit around with my kids, playing games, watching John Oliver. Does it matter what I’d rather do? I didn’t used to think so.

I’d also like to get more activism in my time. But the question is…where? How? When? How do people manage to do it all? Does anyone manage to do it all?

~

One of my favorite drums to beat is “humans aren’t special/unique relative to other life forms.” In my ongoing adventures of reading what I want to believe into news articles, here we have a case for plants as somewhat intelligent life forms. (NPR)

It’s true that they communicate, react to stimulus, and behave in some ways like more complex animal life. I think it’s worth asking what, if any, impact this idea has on the way we treat plants.

Selfishly, I don’t want it to mean anything because I’m not always good at keeping houseplants alive. I’ve got enough Catholic guilt.

~

My offspring remarked upon ads for makeup brand E.L.F. on Roblox (pronouncing it “elf,” like the fantasy creatures). Roblox is working on increasing its value generally. They’re going to be integrating video ads for users over thirteen-years-old. (Variety)

This is the part of the business model where something that used to be awesome gets suckier and more annoying.

~

Two extremely cool teenagers have cracked more proofs for the Pythagorean Theorem. (The Guardian) Calcea Johnson and Ne’Kiya Jackson have added to our understanding of 2000-year-old maths.

What did you accomplish this week? I managed to stop wicked terrible heartburn. Once. Yep.

~

Remember when there were contaminated eye drops? Somehow the superbug has reached dogs. The weird part is that not all the dogs infected actually used eye drops. There are a lot of questions here. (Ars Technica) I think we need Dr. House.

~

Jack Dorsey has left the board of the Millennial retirement home social media. Instead, he wants to go suck some of Elon’s musk. He calls TSFKA Twitter “freedom tech,” and it mostly occurs to me how little the word “freedom” has meant throughout my life.

~

Chicago’s Field Museum is displaying a super important, super cool fossil. (Smithsonian Mag) Archaeopteryx shows signs of feathers in its surrounding slab, providing supporting evidence for evolution.

I recently encountered modern-day Archaeopteryx in the form of extremely angry Canadian geese. The whole “fight or flight” response in these geese appears to be entirely “fight.” We gave them space, hoping they would wander elsewhere, but instead they stood their ground and hissed at us. Monsters! Dinosaur monsters!

~

Chris Pine shows deference for “Princess Diaries 2,” (Variety) which is responsible for his career as an actor. He was overdrawn on his bank account when they offered him $65,000 to be the love interest for Princess Mia.

Thanks to this, we have now had many adorable movies featuring Chris Pine, who seems generally chill and cool and always willing to do genre work (especially in support of women).

I’m trying to be more organized about my work time — that is to say, I want to work similar “business hours” to my spouse (Monday – Friday) and take the weekends off as much as possible.

I completely burned out a few years back, and then 2020 threw me for a big loop. The mess of mental health I’ve been wading through means I went months at a time without doing organized work. I did plenty of things. Drawing, crocheting, even writing — but not with the pressure of finishing anything. And I could go whole days doing nothing at all.

Now I am sober-sober, I want to organize my time and make use of my healing brain.

It’s hard taking weekends off. I *want* to take them off, mind. I have learned the benefits of wasting time on video games quite well. But I just don’t feel good mentally. Unless I manage to leave the house to do stuff (which isn’t always possible), boredom rats eat away at my mood. I still don’t have the energy (or desire) to spend all weekend cleaning, though my house needs it. My body is too sore to always go out on long walks, too.

I don’t know how I’m going to handle this in the long term, but right now I’m doing some Egregious stuff on weekends to keep the boredom rats at bay.

So here we are with another SRF. I didn’t have lots of recent news I wanted to share, so I went back into my link archives to some older posts from the last few months.

~

ChatGPT takes 15x the electricity of a traditional web search. (Quartz) Depending on complexity of the query, every 5-50 prompts is the equivalent of pouring a 16oz bottle of water out on the ground. Some experts say it’s higher than that on average for all generative AI technology. (Bluesky)

Considering this technology is being put in Windows to run constantly, and it looks like Apple will be doing something similar, we’re looking at a ridiculous drain on ecological resources.

No joke…I had a nightmare after I read these statistics. It was the style of a Star Trek episode. We were a civilization the Federation found after we were already gone, wiped out by our use of technology destroying our own planet. It’s an extremely typical Star Trek plot, actually. No coincidence it reminds me of our situation. We’ve been rushing toward “futuretech” for a while, looking at profits before stopping to ask questions about safety, and Star Trek has been trying to reflect that back toward ourselves for generations.

~

Smithsonian Mag says snakes passed a modified self-awareness test, using scent rather than mirrors as we do with other life. This study is “suggesting snakes are more cognitively complex” than we previously thought. I’ve got some real sci-fi/fantasy hippie ideas about consciousness, self-awareness, and animals (which is to say, I think that we’re all not so different), so this just reinforces what I already want to believe.

Speaking of snakes, we might find that robots built like snakes are the best way to explore other worlds. (Ars Technica)

~

We recently lost Chance Perdomo to a motorcycle accident. Gen V will not be recasting his character as they begin production on season 2. (Variety)

This is the right move, though I expect it demands a full rewrite of whatever they planned for season 2 and onward. His character was integral to the show — second main character after Marie.

Although shows in the Boysverse don’t shy from death, these are stylized, edgy comic book shows. It’s hard to imagine how they’ll handle the loss of someone real. I’m sure it will be respectful; I just can’t guess.

~

Director Jane Schroenbaum describes filmmaking as “angry sex between art and commerce,” (Variety) which is such a great quote. I kinda think successful publishing demands the same.

~

I don’t always post Space News on here, but I always tag the articles to share with my space-focused kiddo. It seems worth doing a quick roundup of recent articles.

Ars Technica talks about SpaceX refueling starships in low Earth orbit. I’ve been repeatedly reassured that SpaceX has very little to do with Elon Musk, and we can trust them more than any other commercial space providers, but the very idea of such complex operations associated with them makes me nervous.

Issues with the heat shield, among others, need to be addressed before the crewed Artemis 2 mission is ready. (Quartz) The uncrewed Artemis I tests failed spectacularly. Apparently the safety report wasn’t very helpful, though. (Ars Technica) Artemis 3 is a completely different issue. We’re counting eggs before we hatched Artemis 2 and hoping we can use it to have Starship and Orion dock in low Earth orbit (Ars Technica). I do love the ambition, honestly.

We have a Mars rover in a great spot to search for alien life. (The Conversation via Quartz) Perseverance is collecting samples, and we hope to figure out how to go get them soon.

~

I don’t think a lot about national parks in America. I’m a computer nerd. I like going outdoors sometimes, but when I say sometimes, I mean I did it several times a few summers ago, and then about once or twice a year on average otherwise. I’ve heard about how our large uninhabited parks are special to America. It didn’t occur to me that many of the parks we cherish were not uninhabited starting out, and what America did to make them the way they are. (Collectors Weekly)

This is a substantial, interesting read.

Today, the foundational myth of America’s National Parks revolves around the heroic preservation of “pristine wilderness,” places supposedly devoid of human inhabitants that were saved in an unaltered state for future generations. This is obviously a falsehood: Places like Yosemite were already home to thriving communities that had long cherished—and changed—the environment around them. […]

Though the National Park Service prevented wholesale industrialization, they still packaged the wilderness for consumption, creating a scenic, pre-historical fantasy surrounded by roads and tourist accommodations, all designed to mask the violence inherent to these parks’ creation. More than a century later, the United States has done little to acknowledge the government-led genocide of native populations, as well as the continued hardships they face because of the many bad-faith treaties enacted by the U.S. government. This story is an elemental part of our National Park system, the great outdoor museum of the American landscape, but the myth continues to outweigh the truth. How did the National Park Service evict Yosemite’s indigenous communities and erase their history, and can it come to terms with this troubling legacy today?

~

Discover Magazine shares details of Bronze Age Must Farm, once placed on platforms over an English river.

The wooden community only lasted about a year before burning down. But apparently it was a lush, pleasant year. We know this because the remains sunk into the mud, which then preserved the details. The University of Cambridge has recovered tons of artifacts. It’s all really cool to look at.

~

I don’t sit well with labels generally. One of my favorite things to say is, “Humans invent taxonomy. Humans were made by nature, which knows nothing about taxonomy.”

Well, turns out that humans don’t know *that* much about taxonomy, either. We don’t have a single unified taxonomy that encompasses all life on earth. Undark talks about a fight within the scientific community about rectifying this.

Garnett and Christidis proposed tidying things by creating a universal set of rules for classifying all life on Earth and assigning governance to a single organization: the International Union of Biological Sciences, a nonprofit comprising international science associations.

The notion of imposed authority enraged taxonomists, a fastidious bunch who even Garnett concedes are the opposite of anarchists. In the most prominent rebuttal, 184 people from the global taxonomy community warned in the journal PLOS Biology that the proposed bureaucracy was not only unnecessary and counterproductive, but also a threat to scientific freedom. Such governance would result in “science losing its soul,” wrote a smaller group of Brazilian and French scientists in another journal, raising the specter of Joseph Stalin and his political rejection of established science in the early 20th century.

It sounds like a real nerd fight. I love nerd fights.

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.

~

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.