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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Woo hoo!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Originally, I saw this.

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

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

PopCrave on X reports that the comments she made were:

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

Then I saw this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

~

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?