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

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

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

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

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Ars Technica: Globalism vs. the scientific revolution

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My whole body hurts. What did I do this time? I’m thirty-five years old. For all I know, I committed the cardinal sin of turning the wrong direction too quickly.

I’ve been taking it easy on my hands/arms by limiting crochet for a few days and mostly just starting to weave a strap for a bag. I got stuff to do leatherworking, which I’m excited to start on, but I wanna finish this one slow detailed bag I’ve got going first.

I’m going to curl up and turn off after this. Hopefully my hips will forgive me for whatever sin I committed after I pray to saint tylenol.

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Variety: Disney, Lionsgate, IBM and More Pull Ads From X After Elon Musk’s Antisemitic Remark

The new round of Madison Avenue exits comes as the White House and the European Commission also took a hard stance against X on Friday. “We have seen an alarming increase in disinformation and hate speech on several social media platforms in recent weeks, and X is certainly quite effective of that,” the Commission said in a statement. A White House statement on Friday said that “We condemn this abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans.”

Much less significantly, I’ve stopped posting personal content on X and now do my train-of-thoughts elsewhere, like here and Bluesky.

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The USDA adjusted the plant hardiness map. I’m not in an area that has seen significant change between 2012 and 2023. How about you?

The shifts in the Midwest and Northeast are jarring. And Florida. And Texas. Okay, I guess it’s most of the country. Oof.

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Ars Technica: Measles rises globally amid vaccination crash; WHO and CDC sound the alarm.

Didn’t this surge around 2014 too? I remember that specifically because that’s when my second baby was born. I can’t imagine vaccine resistance has improved since then, unfortunately.

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Sympathy for our Russian friends. Al Jazeera: Russia seeks to outlaw LGBTQ movement as ‘extremist.’ Y’all can’t catch a break, can you?

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Emmet Asher-Perrin at Tor dot Com is not impressed by The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes.

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes takes an unfathomable amount of time setting up key points of relation to the originating trilogy, often in a manner so obvious that it winds up comical. There are mockingjays all over District 12, and Snow doesn’t seem to like them. Lucy Gray sings “The Hanging Tree” at several portentous moments in the film, and possibly also wrote it? Look at all the imagery and symbolism!

Also from Tor.com: a short fiction bundle. Yum.

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NPR: Why Trump’s authoritarian language about ‘vermin’ matters

It’s not that I don’t want people to discuss what an authoritarian he is. I do. I’ve just seen so many people mention this language usage, yet I can think of a million authoritarian actions he actually performed during his presidency, and we don’t talk about most of them. Avoidance as a symptom of shared trauma? Too overwhelmed by the sheer volume of nonsense we suffered to pick it apart?

We already know the majority of people don’t want this guy. But enough want him to jump on the system’s cracks until they snap. I’m not sure what we’ve done to bolster the integrity of our elections. We still have that electoral college. We’re going to see how rugged American democracy is in 2024.

But okay, yes, let’s talk about his authoritarian language.

I’m currently getting my dopamine pathways hijacked by writing movie reviews, but I also love rewatching movies in quick succession. So what do I do when I watch something like 9 to 5 once, write a review, and then watch it again the next day? My initial review was sort of a recap, so going into the meatier themes that made me love the flick seemed about right.

I’ve been having my dopamine pathways hijacked and re-hijacked a lot lately. Earlier this year I got hijacked by a project in Adobe InDesign; that was knocked out of place by an abrupt obsession with crochet on July 31st; I was seized by an interactive fiction project in September that I now have minimal motivation to finish; modding Skyrim took over my dopamine pathways when I lost the novelty of drawing dragon flong.

Hence I do recognize that my desire to write movie reviews, and blog posts in general, especially the kind you’re reading right now, is just another rollercoaster ride for my poor stupid golden retriever dopamine pathways.

Since we’ve established this relationship is frail and will vanish at the drop of a molecule, let’s get into the RSS reader.

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Her Hands, My Hands read one of the urban fantasy classics, First Grave on the Right. Great commentary.

Is it a classic if it was published 13 years ago? It was everywhere 13 years ago. But that was the beginning of my career, and that feels like old-timey days now.

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RBmedia released a list of the bestselling audiobooks of the year.

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I wonder if deciding to remove dog meat from South Korean menus is as good as it sounds, or if it’s a complicated expression of the increasing Westernization of the region. I’ve never eaten it. That would be insane from my cultural perspective. Is it from theirs? I wonder what is lost when a traditional food source is banned.

That said, despite my frequent threats to turn my French bulldog into French onion bulldog soup, I still like dogs better than people and I’m not sad to think of more living dogs.

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Why are Millennials still attached to American Girl?

Parts of this article seem like they might be worthy of consideration, particularly when the opinion comes from outside the article.

Brit Bennett, in her 2015 Paris Review essay on Addy, asks, “If a doll exists on the border between person and thing, what does it mean to own a doll that represents an enslaved child who once existed on that same border?” Such complexity, even uneasiness, was how the brand thrived.

But other parts of the article get my eyebrows lifting.

Almost all dolls prepare girls to perform womanhood. Baby dolls ready them for mothering; Barbies for being sexual objects. Rowland’s twin innovations—a multifaceted, highly detailed consumer universe paired with a doll that was herself a girl—invited girls to perform themselves.

I never once mothered a baby doll in my life, but my baby dolls used to make out with other baby dolls in the closet a lot. My Barbies were up to some weird brainwashing scheme. I really, really don’t think I’m unusual in this experience. One weird assumption like this makes me disengage, honestly.

Maybe it’s as simple as the fact that everyone loves nostalgia, American Girl dolls are easier to buy once you’re a grownup, and some Millennials are at the point where we can get fancy frivolous things for ourselves.

Since I mostly played with 12- and 18-inch fashion dolls as a kid, the sheer size of American Girl dolls was the main source of my interest. They take up a lot of room. I ended up buying a custom boy American Girl for my kid when he was small and the creepy thing lurks in a closet somewhere.

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Karen Gillan still hasn’t managed to escape Steven Moffatt’s writing.

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Swedish dockworkers are refusing to unload Teslas at ports in broad boycott move.

I love this for them.

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Very specific rules around breastfeeding videos mean they can be monetized on YouTube again. I don’t even know how to start unpacking the levels of Bothered I am about this whole entire subject. I breastfed for over six years straight between two children. There’s a major rift in intergenerational knowledge surrounding breastfeeding which communities are still trying to heal. So yeah, folks need videos to help them. But we still have to get really specific about what kind of videos can get compensated for views, just in case there was some nipple and someone might be able to fetishize that? Oh, and make sure there’s a child in the shot. That helps somehow.

I hate tech companies. I miss nursing.

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So…Hugh Grant as an Oompa Loompa is another one I could pick apart for days.

The origin of Oompa Loompas is not as some random magical orange humans. (link is a PDF)

In his 1964 book Charlie and the Chocolate Factory Roald Dahl depicts the iconic Oompa-Loompas as African Pygmy people. […] In Dahl’s 1973 revision of this text he depicts the Oompa-Loompas as white.

Cocoa’s production is troubling, so there’s some cognitive dissonance in seeing a wealthy English actor pout over someone stealing his cocoa beans.

Not to mention that changing Hugh Grant’s proportions means they didn’t cast a little person. Here’s a statement made in regards to a past movie:

A rep for “Little People of America” tells TMZ, the entertainment industry should be actively casting little people.

The rep adds, “This means both casting people with dwarfism as characters that were specifically written to be played by little people … and other roles that would be open to people of short stature.”

I’m not sure how many people were actually at risk of seeing yet another Willy Wonka movie, but I’m not, and this doesn’t change the maths.

Yesterday was so much fun. I watched a ton of movies while weaving, which is so much slower for me than crochet. I can’t put my finger on why it takes so long, nor why I find it dissatisfying, yet I keep picking up that cheap little lap loom to keep adding rows.

It’s not as fun as crochet but it’s Good Enough on days when my hands/arms/shoulders/chest muscles have had enough of punching a hook through tightly-woven heavy-weight acrylic and I clearly need a rest. Who knew I’d have to treat crochet like heavy lifting sometimes? In terms of recovery, anyway.

Didn’t I mention I was watching movies? I was about to *stop* watching movies when I decided to do one more before bed. On a whim, I tossed Four Christmases on the tv, and I loved it. I never would have picked that of my own volition. What a treat!

Of course the world is still outside and my feed is on fire. Shall we read a bit?

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One side-effect of COVID I wouldn’t have expected? It slowed work toward ending tuberculosis. Nonetheless, doctors are getting closer to the end of TB, and they think we’ll see it in this generation.

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I am not a global policy wonk but I’m guessing that Biden and Xi finding a pleasant place in US/China relations is good news for general stability, especially during war in Ukraine and Gaza.

When asked if he would still describe Xi as a dictator, Biden said (to paraphrase): “Yeah, because communists have dictators.”

There are plenty of people in power who see democracy and communism as enemies of one another. Folks can’t escape conflating One Particular Execution of Political System with the Whole Political System. I argue that America doesn’t look real good in its execution of democracy either. Our leadership is so old, they’re still waving McCarthyist era flags, and that’s a *real* bad era for democracy. In America, communism is China’s or Cuba’s dictatorships.

This is on my mind because I was talking to someone in the Boomer generation about her knee-jerk response to words like communism and socialism. A whole generation conditioned to jerkaknee over something so hard, they’ll kick anyone who says, “Maybe public ownership can be better than private ownership in some situations?” There’s minimal room for nuanced discussion about systems of governance that might do more for the social contract America is failing to fulfill.

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My first and favorite talking point about usage of the computer stuff we market as AI is “we need consenting and compensated inclusion in data sets.” Which is to say, I think ‘AI’ can be cool when everyone has agreed to be involved. I still have gross feelings about YouTube’s AI song thing, but that’s probably because my next few talking points are about the ecological impact, practices which continue aggregating wealth at the top, and “how much synthetic media do we really need?”

I do respect how much *fun* AI can be to play with, especially for non-artists, so this is probably in that vein.

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The Crown is back. Before I try it again, I’m going to need a LOT of good reviews saying they treated Diana right. They whiffed it in season 5.

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For kids in crisis, it’s getting harder to find long-term residential treatment.

Intermountain parents and staff were shocked when the facility announced suddenly at the end of the summer that it would close its doors this fall, blaming staffing shortages. […] Megan Stokes recently worked as executive director of the National Association of Therapeutic Schools and Programs. She thinks staff shortages are not the full story regarding Intermountain’s troubles.

“We are seeing a lot of long-term facilities moving to what they call the short-term, intensive outpatient,” she says. “You’re able to get insurance money easier.”

Too many families are suffering unsupported in this country. Many folks are stuck at home in a situation where they can’t provide safe and appropriate care for their children.

Healthcare reform would help a lot of people. I want to see insurers out of the game entirely and medicine made nonprofit. Unrealistic, I know, because there is private insurance even in places like Canada and the UK, but that shouldn’t be the endgame goal.

We have to keep talking about the silent tragedies happening to families all around us right now because they’re too busy to tell us they need help.

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Sega in America is accused of union-busting via layoffs.

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Shadow & Bone was cancelled by Netflix. I’m sad on one hand – I loved the first season, and all the Darkling/Alina fics that spawned from it are *my* Reylo. On the other hand, I didn’t get through the second season and kinda completely hated it. Would I want to hate a third season? No, but if this kills my flow of filthy fanfic, I’m gonna get grumpy.

Unfortunately, that also means no Six of Crows spinoff.

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Jon Stewart versus China continues? This thing has been weird for a while.

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“Can we please stop shooting things in space?” ask private space companies. “It’s hard to fly around the debris.”

Russia shot down one of its older satellites, Kosmos 1408, with a Nudol missile launched from the ground. The test, intended to demonstrate Russia’s capability to shoot down assets in space, showered more than 1,500 pieces of debris into low-Earth orbit. This has forced the International Space Station and Chinese Tiangong station to perform avoidance maneuvers, along with many private and government-owned satellites.

Russia is not the only country to perform such tests. India recently did so, and in the more distant past, China and the US have also demonstrated such capabilities.

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You can read an excerpt from Tananarive Due’s new book, The Reformatory, on Tor.com.

Happy Wednesday. It’s a quiet week in the House of Reine. We put up the Christmas tree (this is late for us) and I’ve been enjoying my holiday turn toward romance- and comedy-themed movies. I watch a lot of the same movies every year, even if I hate them, which is how you end up with me developing an entire standup routine my family must endure whenever I watch Love Actually again.

I try to have an RSS feed reader that keeps me scrolling through hundreds of articles a day across many sites – that way I get a broad look at things and don’t get bogged down on Reddit. It seems it might be fun to read the feed “together” and round up some snippets of my commentary on the articles as we go.

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Meta calls for legislation to require parental approval for teens’ app downloads.

I don’t love anything that puts walls between youths and the potential support and information of the internet. Parents’ best interests are not always the kids’ best interests. Kids who are queer, abused, or otherwise reluctant to share everything with their parents deserve to be able to find community elsewhere. Sometimes the internet is the only place that can happen.

It seems like Meta doesn’t want to engage with their audience-manipulating practices; they want to put the onus on safety elsewhere, even if that’s going to make youths more vulnerable whether they get on the site or not. It’s fine for Instagram to manipulate people as long as adults give the thumbs up, right?

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Workers Unionize at Drawn & Quarterly, Vaunted Literary Graphic Novel Publisher.

It’s wonderful seeing how unions standing together are inspiring more unions to do the same. The labor movement historians called as a likely follow-up to this pandemic continues to gather momentum.

While “working with the publishing team and D&Q authors is a joy,” one publishing assistant, commenting under condition of anonymity, said in a statement, “we often work long hours and engage with the comics industry outside of our jobs because we are passionate about bringing excellent comics to readers without additional compensation. While there are lots of opportunities to take on more responsibilities and learn more skills in the publishing office, there are rarely paths to promotion for assistants. It’s hard to see or commit to a future if there are not transparent conversations about what all our learning and acquired skills might lead to.”

I hope the workers get what they’re asking for.

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Like Obamacare that way: Benefits from Biden’s infrastructure bill sinking in.

People generally like the impacts of Biden’s infrastructure bill.

Still, some polls show Biden trailing Trump.

Many Americans have always supported fascism. The ability to own, control, and destroy other humans is core to the foundation of the United States of America. Until we honestly reconcile this history and contemporary reality, we’re going to have plenty of enthusiastic grassroots support for getting fascist strongmen in charge.

That’s why the popularity of Biden’s infrastructure bill isn’t necessarily salient to the election. The fascist right has an unchanging base. Meanwhile, other Americans can see our own history and know that the center-right incrementalism of the Democratic party is worse than treading water unless we have serious reform against corruption.

I’m optimistic that the aforementioned labor movement could give rise to new leadership with a genuine eye for reform, but I don’t really have anything to back up that feeling except my dreamy wish it would happen.

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It’s been 10 years since Batkid. He’s now fifteen-years-old and healthy. That’s so nice.

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Who in the world wants this? Edith Piaf AI-Generated Biopic is in the works at Warner Music.

The film will be narrated by an AI-generated facsimile of Piaf’s voice and promises to “uncover aspects of her life that were previously unknown.”

“Animation will provide a modern take on her story, while the inclusion of archival footage, stage and TV performances, personal footage and TV interviews will provide audiences with an authentic look at the significant moments of Piaf’s life,” the music company said in announcing the project.

It’s hard to imagine how artificial narrative would be superior to human narrator. Since the estate is involved, it’s not like anyone else has the right to tell them no, but I suppose audiences will determine whether they prefer a resurrected Piaf or La Vie en Rose.