I’ve mentioned before that I see what traffic goes where on this site, so I know that people *generally* don’t read the posts I don’t link on social media, and I almost never link SRF posts. Nonetheless, I enjoy the effect of dailyish blogging. For one thing, my sibling often still reads it, and Rory’s basically the only audience I ever care about, period. It’s a nice way to bring up news articles I might forget to discuss. I prefer not to be super-duper verbal irl. It’s always been easier to communicate like this.

Also, just writing informally like this each day is good for me. It feels very good in terms of my writing skills, which feels weird to say, given that I have written so many millions of words that it isn’t worth counting. I am now so deeply sunken into nonverbal hobbies like crochet that I can go hours barely even *thinking* words, much less trying to form a coherent message out of them.

I suspect that doing link round-ups with little life updates is giving me more or less the benefits of journaling. I also journal. But that’s almost all doodles (and 50% of those doodles are penises and boobies) so YES, it’s just good to be writing each day in some format.

If I were motivated, I would try to flog all my friends into starting blogs and tell them how good it feels to stay in the practice of casual writing. Epistolary relationship with the void? But tbh I just want everyone to start blogs so I can follow them there and spend less time on social media. 2005 internet, I still miss you, forever.

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My kids put together a couple of gingerbread houses today. My family is the opposite of perfectionist. For us it’s like, we keep at it for a few minutes while the experience is novel and we’re enjoying the Christmas vibes, but then we’re putting these barely-decorated gingerbread monstrosities on the shelf and eating the candy. God knows when we’ll remember to throw out the dusty carcasses of cat-licked half-decorated desiccated gingerbread houses.

We’re weird disasters together so I feel VERY holidays right now.

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Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket will return to flight tomorrow after over a year grounded (Engadget)

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In Surreal Portraits, Rafael Silveira Plunges Into the Mysteries of the Human Psyche (Colossal)

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Olly is going to Sweden for Eurovision 2024! Is this the year I care about Eurovision?? (Variety)

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Julia Roberts has opinions about her characters post-movie, shared with Entertainment Weekly. I have not gotten an impression that Roberts is actually fond of romcoms so I’m not surprised these are a little odd. Anna “maintained her waist size.” Mmm.

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The FDA is investigating whether lead in applesauce pouches was deliberately added (NPR)

Yikes.

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Kuwait’s Emir Sheikh Nawaf has passed away at the age of 86. This isn’t an area of world politics I know much about. Here is Al Jazeera’s roundup of statements from other world leaders, and NPR’s obituary has some more information about his career from an American perspective.

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Pakistan is using artificial rain to fight pollution. (AJE) It’s interesting to hear about geoengineering remedies for such issues, but it sounds like areas of effect are limited, and I gotta wonder what happens once all those air contaminants are in the water supply.

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The Marginalian has a fascinating read comparing principles of exercise to writing. I think about this all the time! Actually, I compare principles of exercise to just about everything all the time.

The one I think about most is overload: You need to push past your normal limits in order to grow. I personally think of it as “training to 120% of what you need to do.” If you’re Beyonce and wanna look Beyonce-sharp at Beychella, you can’t just rehearse for Beychella. You commit to an overall training plan that will make you physically capable of doing a performance 120% the size of Beychella, so Beychella is effortless.

I think this 120% preparation principle probably applies to a few areas in life. I wouldn’t describe it as “overload” in regards to writing though. What I usually do is write at least 120% of the words that actually get published. For all the functional, useful words I write, I also write off in other directions to condition myself. (Fanfic, poetry, essays, movie reviews, etcetera.)

Another useful principle is specificity: In order to get better at writing novels, you just gotta write novels. It’s also more granular than that. You get better at writing urban fantasy by writing UF. You get better writing close POV writing close POV. And if you *only* write those things, your skills are not *entirely* transferable; you will need to get specific to learn about writing romance if you’re coming from a thrillers-specific background.

But I would argue the Principle of Rest is actually most important, and it’s the principle I’ve taken everywhere to extremely healing results. When you exercise (especially as you age) (and especially if you do high-stress stuff like heavy compound lifts), you need to rest in a very deliberate way. You can’t just keep running around willy nilly if you’re training for a marathon. You have to make sure you’re sleeping a lot, drinking a lot of water, doing light exercises to keep comfortable, and sometimes you don’t train at all. Sometimes between marathons, you might need to take off months! (I think I heard a marathoner gasp somewhere just when I typed it. But I said what I said.)

The same thing goes with creativity. You can’t push-push-push, even when it feels great. You must consciously, deliberately rest from that kind of creative activity. You need things that help you turn off entirely. And you need stuff that refills your cup.

If you’re a writer, you don’t need to do ice bath plunges out of a hot tub. What you might need is a week away from words occasionally. Stop writing and go for a bunch of walks. Take extra time to nap. Watch a bunch of trashy junk tv. Draw penises in your journal.

Most of my productive work these last couple of low mood days has been crocheting. Has anyone else noticed that crocheting is awesome? No? It’s just me? I literally invented it? Yeah well crochet is awesome.

I’m tearing through a hex cardigan with amazing patience. I have no idea where this came from. I can say “I’m going so fast on this!” after I’ve spent like, four hours a day working on it for at least five days. And I mean it! I just don’t care that it’s taking so long to put together.

I did care before I made my Buttons Collection. That’s a group of ten crocheted purses made with prefab fake leather bases, each in increasing complexity. They started out taking a long afternoon to make, then turned into week-long projects by the end. They actually *aren’t* the same stitch repeated endlessly, but in fact pretty complicated! So I don’t know why I gained this new degree of patience from making those, but I have.

It’s super nice. Maybe I will have time to crochet a couple other smaller presents before Christmas.

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I reviewed Barbie. It’s one of my longer reviews; the unabridged version is 2000 words. There’s a more focused version on Letterboxd.

I think that I managed to get across the complexity of thought and emotion that I hoped to impart, but I almost think it’s silly to engage on that level? Because once you do engage on that level, the movie’s a bit of a glass onion. It looks like a very layered movie to sell toys. If you peel through the layers of metaphor and aesthetic, you find…it wants to sell you toys.

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Mayim Bialik declined to host a Jeopardy event during the SAG-AFTRA strike. Subsequently she will no longer be hosting Jeopardy. (NPR)

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I’m suddenly seeing articles about how all our devices (Ars Technica) with microphones are eavesdropping (Variety) as if we didn’t know about it already.

Confirmation does make it feel different, but on a practical level, nothing has changed.

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AJE talks about Javier Milei’s three-year rise to power as a bad-haired far-right Argentinian president. I was trying to pick a paragraph to pull quote but it’s kinda too big a picture to reduce it in that way.

He came up in the desperation of COVID-19, but there are a lot of other factors, many of which rhyme with other populist figures.

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The US decided pandemic aid was good enough and let it run out. Homelessness has hit record highs. (NPR)

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Oppenheimer 4k Blu-rays are selling out in a time when retailers are trying to offload all their stock of physical media. (Variety)

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Larian Studios informs us that Baldur’s Gate III will never come to Game Pass. (Engadget) The reasoning is more than fair.

Vincke says that Baldur’s Gate 3 is a “big game” that’s available for a “fair price.” He also touted the title’s lack of microtransactions and its complete story, saying “you get what you pay for.” To that end, a completionist run in Baldur’s Gate 3 takes more than 140 hours, according to HowLongToBeat. That breaks down to about 40 cents an hour, which seems like a good value to me.

I agree. It’s a great value. This game is all I ever want from games. I’ve been doing the thing where I restart games about a thousand times before I actually finish it, so I think I’ve cleared 140 hours and I’m not even out of the first act. lol

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The difficulty we’re having discussing Israel and Palestine in America (NPR) reminds me of McCarthyism a bit, but I wasn’t actually alive for that so I don’t know if it’s a good comparison. Pretty grim though.

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Just kidding! Keep the nudity off Twitch. (Engadget) I had predicted that the updated policy would benefit pornbots rather than normal folk, but actually, AI-generated porn immediately swamped the system and they got rid of it again.

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Digby’s Hullaballoo challenges us to put our ferocious feelings into actions. It’s a fair challenge. But it also feels a bit like more finger-wagging from author Anand Giridharadas, a professional pundit. Saying, “You’re not doing the thing” is easy. Saying, “Come do the thing with me!” and following through is a lot harder.

Most of us don’t have the skills for organization; many of us do not have the capability. A lot of leftists are disabled and, one way or another, stuck in our houses. We organize online, which is meaningful; I have been lucky to be adjacent to rather massive community movements to see it happen. I see how organizers (many of whom are also disabled in another way) bring people together with awe and admiration.

I can name a few organizers in my community I’m grateful for, since I tend to orbit around romancelandia’s political activism at a distance, and they’re so much more motivational than a dude on Chris Hayes saying “you aren’t doing the thing.” And most of us honestly aren’t organizers, but followers. We wanna follow.

Do the thing and invite us to join you, please?

As physically quiet as the anti-Trumpism is, I expect an absolute tidal wave of quietly terrified voters in November. The question to me is whether our extant so-called democratic systems will matter. Reformation on the institutional level hasn’t been happening very quickly, has it?

I made the featured image on this post a stock photo of a panda (thanks Depositphotos) because I’m grumpy and it’s harder to be grumpy around pandas.

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Yesterday I thought I was calling Dean Phillips stupid on Bluesky, only to realize it was only a mechanical turk shilling for him. Then I felt really bad calling a mechanical turk stupid and I felt especially clueless for forgetting nobody ever stands somewhere they can catch the mud they deserve.

One thing I hate about Reality is the layers of protection between the people who deserve to get cussed at and me, the person who wants to cuss at them. I have a very narrow strip of humanity that I believe truly, in my soul, deserve to be cussed at, and yet another empty suit running an ego parade to agitate the base against the incumbent (who i don’t. even. like.) is someone who absolutely deserves to be cussed at.

But he’s not even doing his own dirty work, of course. I always suspect a blowhard like Dean Phillips (I hope he has a google alert on his name) is a bad actor benefiting from outside governments’ funding knowingly or otherwise. Knowingly or otherwise, the man is stupid, and goddammit I want to be standing somewhere I can tell him directly. I want to look that man in the eye (through my phone screen ideally because the outdoors? yikes) and say, “You are wasting everyone’s time and money and you are BAD FOR THE COUNTRY, stupid.”

Telling the ruling class that they suck is actually a really important civic duty.

Which is why they hire people to stand around and get told *they* suck instead.

I always know there’s a reason I keep myself reined in on my natural levels of grumpiness, and it’s because I always regret taking out my grumpiness on anyone. I like being a bit of a grumpy person. I just really don’t think the vast majority of humanity has earned it. Everyone (who isn’t Dean Phillips) is a potential friend and current neighbor.

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I finally posted my review for Lucy. I had to edit it a few times before posting because I have *really* strong feelings about older men taking advantage of younger women, to the point I wrote entire fiction series about it. I managed to make things less rageful I think? Well, less expletive riddled.

I once knew an author whose fetish was transparently abuse against women; he often spoke of how much he loved seeing their strength by how they prevailed. How their bodies could be liquefied by the abuse, yet they would keep going.

This was an author I knew through a professional space. I looked around at his online presence and the fact his fetish was beating women was very obvious. It was in his art, his books, everything. Worse, he tried to involve everyone in his fetish. He always tried to turn forum discussions toward this violence and how hot it is for powerful women to stand through it.

I made him my personal project. I rallied support on the board and I wouldn’t stop commenting on everything he posted. I made such a public stink about this man fetishizing abuse of women, and trying to abuse women on the internet, that an extremely complacent white dude admin finally banned him.

And that admin then scolded me publicly because he didn’t like I’d put him in a position where he was forced to act. I told him he should be grateful I forced him to act like a decent human. And then I threw a forum party for the women who were safer *despite* the actions of *extremely whiny and complacent* men who were happy to enable this shit.

I have zero room in my heart for men like that. No patience. No quarter. They deserve to retreat in shame.

So I kinda gotta avoid that stuff when I can’t go flaming sword about it? Because I *want* to go flaming sword, but the forum situation was one place where I could actually be effective. I have no power against Hollywood directors. I am just some guy.

Hence Lucy is simply a bad movie by an uncreative fool who hates women and that’s gotta be where I leave it.

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A review of Rebel Moon from Variety isn’t exactly enthusiastic. I don’t trust Variety to know genre well enough to tell the difference between a stale trope and an old trope executed in a new way. I’m gonna have to watch it and see what I think.

Zack Snyder is kind of an odd duck. I don’t think I’ve seen a movie of his I would necessarily call “good,” and I think we have vastly different opinions about humanity that leave us little room for overlap in taste. But his movies are interesting, if nothing else. I usually enjoy trying to figure out wtf he was thinking enough to watch em twice.

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The Marginalian talks about being thin-skinned as a kind of permeable membrane that means we feel the amount of universe inside of us more. This is my kind of drug logic, I love it. Yesss just call me a walking biphospholipid membrane why don’t you

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We, culturally, lost our dear parasocial friend Andre Braugher to aggressive lung cancer. Love for the Braugher family. Sooo much love.

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A noteworthy portion of pandemic relief funding went to the arts. (NPR) I would be interested to know how much of that funding reached the working class.

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I blogged about alloparents in a previous Sara Reads the Feed, and here NPR shares lots of heartwarming alloparenting stories from people patiently indulging white americans who didn’t know it takes a village.

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NPR also reports that Prince Harry has won one of his cases against the British media.

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This Tor dot Com review of A Study in Drowning sounds interesting, so I’m putting the review here to come back around and try the book later. I’m way more interested in books that have a supportive story about the artist and methodology, tbh. I’m way more interested in methodology than hooks.

That said, doesn’t it kinda suck how many of us have to put lipstick on our trauma and then market it to other people so we can make a living?

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The Eyewall has the funnest read about blowing up tornadoes.

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More from Carmack about classic Doom. (Ars Technica) He’s had a lot to say the last couple years, so if these insights are valuable to you beyond nostalgia, definitely do a googlin.

As for the nostalgia element? Listening to Carmack talk is like sitting down with an old computer guy who was programming using punch cards. If you haven’t had the privilege, I’ll tell you that you can indeed get grains of interesting information out of them, around an overwhelming onslaught of happy old nerd man just kinda…talking. The nostalgia is never enough to get me through it, lol. I say this with *enormous* love for happy old nerd men, several of which alloparented me from 18-24 years old.

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Federal regulators might crack down on Starbucks’s union busting. (NYT)

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Articles about an A24 Death Stranding movie keep coming across my timeline. I don’t think I’ve mentioned on Egregious that this is one of my all-time favorite video games against *incredibly* steep competition, like Doom. The cutscenes of Death Stranding alone form an outstanding flick, and they know it, so this will be an original story in the same universe. I’m totally open to it, but apprehensively so, as any elder video game fan approaches movie adaptations of the games we like.

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Tor dot Com actually has a lotta good reviewers on board. I loved this read about Gene Wilder’s Wonka as one of the fey.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m pulling back on visits with my bffs caffeine and weed so my mood is sourer than hag testicles.

I think I’d been eating food that had gone a little funny. My sense of taste has honestly never been the same since I got covid in 2022 – although it did mostly return – and I’m never sure if food Actually Tastes Bad or if I just Think Food Tastes Bad. So I was eating bad carton eggs for a couple days.

I’ve discovered my digestion is tied to everything else in my body – basically if my digestion goes bad for any reason, *everything else* will go bad in a dramatic way. I had a *really* bad night two nights ago, and dodgy eggs would account for some of the issues. I am on lowkey gastric rest and reducing digestive stressors (like caffeine) so I will be okay.

I hope you’re in the mood for me to be grumpy about the news because I sure am.

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Literally right now I am just kinda playing BGIII because existing is exhausting and I can barely move. Video games are the ideal distraction for a shitty Sara.

I made one of my book characters as a cleric, and we hooked up with Astarion, and I’m good now. I feel like life is good.

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I’ve been haunted by this New Yorker article about so-called self-driving cabs ever since I read it. Did you know that those self-driving cabs without anyone visibly behind the wheel may (probably) still have a human worker actually hidden in a compartment inside the car?

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According to Netflix’s streaming data, JLo’s about as much the star of 2023 as Margo Robbie.

It’s fun seeing Netflix release these numbers. Amazon would never do it for their book authors, but for…gosh, I was gonna say years, but it’s honestly at least a decade now…self-published and ebook-first titles have been vastly outpacing their traditional publishing brethren in audience. Indies could sprint circles around new releases from major household name authors sometimes, and nobody would ever report on it because those ephemeral numbers simply don’t count.

Efforts from various publishing forces have kneecapped this to a degree, but there are still indies that the greater world had never heard of making 6+ figures *each month*, completely dominating entertainment in many households, just like JLo.

And I bet JLo doesn’t compare to the viewerships of some independent youtubers or TikTokers.

Will there ever be a cultural reconciliation of this media environment, or is the money and power traditional media companies hold total enough to keep this shit second-tier forever?

I don’t actually have to care anymore, lol. I bounce off of everything popular no matter the distribution lines. The “entertainment media as social bonding” part of my brain is utterly broken. And since I’m only trying to serve my own creations to an audience of roughly 10 reliable buds, I’ve got zero horses in the game. Neigh? Nay.

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Twitch walked back their thing about nudity a little bit.

My prediction is that it’s like Tumblr, where they got rid of nudity long enough to drive away all the interesting, disabled, queer adult creators, but they’ll let the porn bots back.

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Trains in Poland were designed with ransomware and got bricked by the creator. (Ars Technica)

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Since we learned the government has been spying on Apple’s push notifications without warrants, Apple now has the same policy as Google: law enforcement needs a warrant. (Engadget)

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Variety asks, where are the major nominations for Ava DuVernay’s movie?

I’m working on a couple reviews right now that feel a little too big for my normal review format. Plus, they aren’t romcoms, so it doesn’t feel urgent.

Birds of Prey: The Fabulous Emancipation of Harley Quinn was the last movie I saw in the theaters before the 2020 pandemic shutdowns, and for that reason alone, I hadn’t revisited it in ages. There was just a big flip in my life shortly after it came out. Now I feel like I can’t review it without talking about Suicide Squad, The Suicide Squad, and Barbie, because the four movies are all part of Margo Robbie’s search for a big IP girlboss feminism outlet.

Lucy (2014) is another movie I saw in theaters. This one comes from the days where I would watch anything in the theater, and I didn’t know Luc Besson married a fucking child, so I thought seeing another action movie from the guy who made The Fifth Element would be interesting. Lucy completely baffled me in 2014. Even knowing I would hate it, I wanted to know what I missed, so I watched again.

I’ve now taken enough drugs and encountered enough rapist abusers to parse the movie, and I have a *real* angry review to write about it. I just don’t know where to start when I’m this disgusted.

Anyhoo those reviews will be coming at *some* point.

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My mood is really negative today because I’m having health problems. I need to take time to reorient myself in love and peace because I’m also deciding to withdraw on Substances (namely mood-boosters cannabis and caffeine) so it’s going to be a lotta feeling real crappy for a minute. Right now, you’re getting the crabbiest read of the news possible.

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Balloon Juice has a current covid news roundup. The tl;dr is that you should be masking again if you stopped.

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Variety rounds up tributes to Andre Braugher from Brooklyn 99 cast members. My heart hurts, so I’m glad I got to laugh at this story.

“Insecure” showrunner Prentice Penny, who also wrote for “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” recalled an on-set memory between himself, Crews and Braugher: “He was so warm with us and then when a white person would walk by, he’d look serious again. He then leaned in and said ‘Gotta keep ‘em on they toes.’”

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Brian Cox reads a poem by Palestinian teacher Refaat Alareer. Sorry for the twt link.

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Guttation is one of my favorite things my plants do, and I don’t actually love this art. (Colossal) It feels meant to evoke gross-out feelings with the drippy look of the statues, and the amount of guttation depicted.

To me, guttation is a graceful thing, a happy thing my plants do when I’m tending them well. I have occasionally reached out my tongue to take a tiny drop of guttation off a philodendron leaf. I don’t poison my plants with pesticides or anything, and a tiny drop has a lot of flavors from something inedible, and it feels precious to be able to taste it. Or I will take the guttation on my finger and see how it streaks like a tear. Guttation feels sweet and intimate to me, but these sculptures feel loud, gross, and visceral–something I’d enjoy, probably, if framed by anything besides guttation.

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Extremely rich man James Cameron is talking about his jerk-off project to people who just can’t wait to hear what extremely rich man is doing to waste money next. (Variety) Apparently Avatar 3 is going to be more complex. I assume that means he’s going to double down on being racist and tell an even worse story about it.

If you’d like to hear about how he wasted money in the past, there’s also an article about hiring short people to make his Titanic set look bigger. I feel like there’s a dirty joke waiting to happen here. I’ll get back to you later.

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This article about ChatGPT getting “lazy” (Ars Technical) is thought-provoking to me, because marketing really, really wants us to attribute humanlike qualities to ChatGPT and it’s succeeding. We talk about large language models hallucinating, we conveniently like to pretend it isn’t stealing from everyone, and people keep acting like these things learn.

It’s similar to the fallacies that lead us to compare human brains to computers, when they don’t work similarly even a little bit. Psychological pareidolia is natural to us; we humanize everything instinctively. It’s adorable. Marketing is taking advantage of it, and we’re just letting them do it.

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Variety again: Anne Hathaway is right to say that she couldn’t have done Barbie instead of Margot Robbie, though I think Hathaway does have the look/charm. She’s simply not on the girlboss feminist arc Margot Robbie has been. Literally only Margot Robbie, coming out of her experiences with WB as Harley Quinn, could have made Barbie the way it turned out, and people seem really happy with its level of engagement with gender issues.

They also note that Hathaway would have been Black Cat in Raimi’s Spider-Man 4, which means there’s no universe where we don’t get subjected to an extremely shallow portrayal of a feline-themed comic book character by extremely flat Hathaway, who is much more Barbie Comics than DC Comics. (No insult.)

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Chain pharmacies are bootlickers who will give cops anything they want without a warrant. (Engadget)

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“Ew, animal sacrifice from ancient cultures!” says the title of a blog published within a culture that lives off meaningless mass death. (Ars Technica)

It’s a good read after the title, though.

Ancient writings describe equid sacrifices in the Mediterranean, sometimes involving hundreds of animals, but there had previously not been much evidence to back this up. There were far fewer than a hundred at Casas del Turuñuelo, although most were equids. The ages of all sacrifices at their time of death were estimated by signs of wear on their teeth. Most were found to have been male working animals in the prime of life, and eight of them had wear caused by iron bits found in their mouths. This provides further evidence for them having been used for war, transportation, or agricultural work.

Something that stood out in Phase 1 was that the equids in that phase had evidently been sacrificed in pairs or at least positioned that way postmortem. The archaeologists suggest they might have pulled carts together before death. There was also an instance in Phase 2 where the necks of two skeletons were crossed in the center of what was once a courtyard. Whether this was part of a ritual associated with either a deity or the afterlife of a deceased owner is unknown.

Why horses, in particular, were sacrificed remains an open question. The researchers think there is a possibility that they were used in a funerary sacrifice so the deceased could enter the afterlife alongside their loyal companions. This has been evidenced in other ancient cultures, such as the Scythians of what is now Russia and Ukraine, who would sacrifice horses at a funeral. Whether this was the case for at least some of the equids at Casas del Turuñuelo is still a mystery.

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The New Yorker spends more time reviewing Wonka than I would bother, and it sounds like what it looked like in the trailers.

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My absolute favorite read of the week was this article about a mother helping her local addict community with harm reduction. It’s wonderful, meaningful work, and NPR handled it with great sensitivity.

Renae occasionally monitors illegal drug use at her home for Christina and a few dozen other people she’s grown close to over the years. It’s an informal, rarely discussed version of the controversial overdose prevention centers, also known as supervised consumption sites, where trained staff supervise people using drugs. Those clinics are endorsed by the American Medical Association and other leading medical groups but condemned by critics who say they sanction, even endorse, drug use.

Heavy but good read. Very human. Very loving.

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Fun photos over here on Al Jazeera English: A new kind of quinceañera celebration — for Mexico’s elderly