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

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

~

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

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

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

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

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

~

Onto reading the news.

~

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

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

~

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

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

~

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

~

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

~

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

~

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

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

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

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

I began publishing in 2011.

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

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

More about this later.

~

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

~

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

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

~

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

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

~

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

~

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

~

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

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

~

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

~

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

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

~

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

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

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

~

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

~

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

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

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

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

~

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

This is a substantial, interesting read.

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

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

~

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

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

~

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

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

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

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

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

I have such an abusive relationship with my maidenhair fern. If any of my plants were to die forever, and I wouldn’t be even *slightly* sad, it is the maidenhair. Her name is Marion. She basically dies every 2-3 months when I water her a couple days late. Every time, I think, “This is it. This is the time she won’t come back from it.” And then she does.

Anyway, she’s dead this morning. She’ll be back in a week. Fuck that plant. We’ve been doing this for like four years now.

~

I finished editing Fated for Firelizards after a push on Friday, and I’m ready to get it off my plate. I want to do something else now. I’ve gotta work out email garbage, but then I’ll publish the ebook.

I’m all-in on Insomniac Cafe until I’m done with that. It’s been mostly done but unfinished for years. This is the year where I complete things and harvest all my efforts, after all.

Although I keep thinking “I really wanna go smoke a jay,” I can’t deny how much easier it is to get work done when I’m sober-sober. And getting sober-sober is a process of *weeks*. It’s not worth a jay. That was a crutch I felt I needed when I was dealing with a lot more traumatic shit, but the traumatic shit is processed and past, and I gotta do the rest of my life. Yanno?

~

I’m not sure how I’ve watched Voyager all the way through twice in the last couple years, yet I’m still riveted on this, my third watch. I love it so much. Episodes with the most mundane concepts, like Paris getting framed for murder in “Ex Post Facto,” are executed so brilliantly that I just love them.

I’m also rewatching Friends (at least the first season) because it’s much of the inspiration for Insomniac Cafe. I’ve finally gotten older than the Friends — quite a bit so, actually. They turn 30 on the show and I’m 36 now. But they’ve never really seemed younger than me, somehow. I think the 90s fashion and plastic surgery just made them keep coding older a while. Now I’m noticing the age gap more dramatically. They act in ways where I’m like, “Oh gosh, they’re young.” And now I am not — at least, not in the way they are.

Sometimes the aging thing bothers me more than others. I think I’m okay where I am for the moment. More emotional breakdowns to come later, I’m sure. I’m like a constant ball of existential terror.

~

Speaking of breakdowns, the NHS recognizes montelukast as a source of psychiatric problems, (The Guardian) especially in children. Montelukast has been a miracle medicine for me. And I’m not a stable human.

I am usually quite depressed — in the sense that it’s hard to do some routines, I’m usually battling “low” thoughts, I sleep a ton, I don’t have a lot of energy — but on the whole, for me, I’m doing pretty well. So I don’t think montelukast has been a problem for me. Maybe it’s because I’m not a child. It’s still surprising to see how dramatic the adverse symptoms can be for others.

~

How amazing. I’d heard before that orangutans are the most intelligent, human-like of primates, but we’ve now seen an orangutan using medicinal herbs to treat a wound. (AJE)

Scientists saw the Sumatran orangutan named Rakus pluck and chew up leaves of a medicinal plant used by people throughout Southeast Asia to treat pain and inflammation. The adult male then used his fingers to apply the plant juices to an injury on the right cheek. Afterwards, he pressed the chewed plant to cover the open wound like a makeshift bandage.

I will tell anyone who stops to listen that most primates shouldn’t be in zoos, but I especially mean this for orangutans. And this just kinda emphasizes to me that they’re sapient intelligences who should be left free to grow and develop naturally, with dignity, agency, and respect.

Over time, I become more convinced that there is no real human exceptionalism; we’re just more complex and developed than most animals. But elephants mourn, crows use tools, and whales teach each other to attack yachts. There are cultures there. Intelligence. Consciousness.

I have fairly pragmatic attitudes about human use of livestock but I really, really don’t think we respect animals the way we should.

~

WaPo talks hammerhead worms. They pop up as a subject in my gardening groups a lot, and the consensus is generally that you should kill them. Not by cutting. That just helps them multiply.

Ways to kill a hammerhead worm include:

[Y]ou can kill the hammerhead flatworm by dropping it into a container and using one of these methods:

Keeping the container in the direct sun for several hours.
Sprinkling some table salt into the container.
Squirting some hand sanitizer into the container.
Placing the container in a freezer.
Adding soapy water into the container.

Apparently hammerhead worms aren’t *quite* as toxic as my gardening groups report, but try not to touch them too much. And no licking, ya weirdo.

Squirmies and crawlies are also worthy of life and respect, but this is one of the areas where my feelings are pragmatic. Hammerhead worms are invasive in North America. They threaten native life. Drop them in a murder bucket and make it quick, please.

In other agricultural news, the EPA is talking about banning acephate, a pesticide that was banned in the EU twenty years ago. (ProPublica) Yeah, let’s do that.

~

I really enjoyed reading this article about Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron as an anti-comfort movie. Spoilers for the movie ahoy, so I won’t excerpt it, but the message resonates with me. I am still eagerly awaiting it on streaming.

~

I’m done with Airbnb et al, but I do find the property decked out like the X-Men mansion (Variety) to be pretty charming. I’d spend so much time in the danger room.

~

Lawyers, Guns, & Money talks about how white people always oppose protest movements.

Regardless of the quality of the strategy or whether this is actually going to work or whatever, none of that matters much to the key point, which is that people oppose ALL forms of protest, no matter how peaceful or how not peaceful.

I truly had no idea that supporting free speech — ESPECIALLY organized protests — was so broadly unpopular among white people (my demographic). That’s just not how I grew up! I grew up with such respect for demonstrations and consider it part of my civic duty.

At first I thought, “Well my family of five is all in favor of protests, so we break the statistic.” Then I had the depressing thought, “That just means there’s three other families of five who all don’t support them.”

~

Why are we still talking about Kristi Noem? (The Guardian) I find this confusing. South Dakota isn’t one of the more influential states in the United States, and I do expect certain rural behaviors from folks in SD — like seeing dogs in a functional way that means you can shoot them if they don’t meet your standards, however unreasonable. We have family who are “shoot the dog who misbehaved” kind of rural-leaning. It’s not uncommon, I’m afraid. Harping on the story isn’t going to change anyone’s mind.

So I get that we sentimental dog lovers had to process the story about puppy Cricket for a while. But now we’re still covering Noem’s other errors and lies when she’s a state-level politician where few Americans live. I think it’s established she’s not going to be Trump’s VP pick. Giving her attention is just, well, giving her attention. It doesn’t seem to actually boost a Democratic position versus Republicans. It seems to just make polarization worse.

Oh, maybe I just explained it for myself. Guess it could also be click-based.

Today I pulled my 9-year-old into my cozy rocking chair (which is super-wide) so we could play a game on my phone together. I haven’t done that in a while. In this house, we all have our own devices. I don’t really like playing games with other people anyway. But it was extremely snuggly today, and I’m always amazed at how quickly he picks things up. He notices stuff I never do. He only needed about 1-2 minutes watching the game to grasp most of the rules.

It was nice snuggling. He’s been sick, so I was limiting contact to limit my own viral load. I think I did get the bug from him a bit. I was achy and exhausted yesterday. We’re both doing better though! So I got to refill my cup on Sunshine snugs.

Meanwhile I have been spending the vast majority of my time with 13yo by going on long walks. I like it because I have a hard time listening to people talk if we are just sitting around talking. Once I start walking, I can hear and absorb everything. I *want* to hear everything they say. It’s so frustrating how normally my attention wanders. This way, we get sun, we get movement, we get a real connection.

I’ve been saying walks are like medicine, because they are. My mental health is garbage if I don’t administer that medicine each day. I’ve noticed a significant impact on my kids too, so if I see they’re not feeling good, it’s time to put on shoes and get out there.

~

I’ve been watching the whole bird flu outbreak in American dairy cows. I took a week or two off buying milk while I waited for the FDA to confirm that there’s no live virus in dairy products, and it’s looking good. (Gizmodo via Quartz) Yesterday they announced their most extensive tests showed no live virus.

That doesn’t mean we’re out of the woods, though.

Bird flu is always a potentially serious threat in part because flu strains native to birds are less familiar to the immune system of humans and other mammals. Right now, these viruses can’t transmit well between people. But the longer that H5N1 is able to linger in cows, the greater the likelihood that some strains will adapt and become better at spreading between mammals, humans included. And the right assortment of mutations could turn a bird flu virus into a deadly and fast-spreading pandemic germ.

This is my main concern at the moment. I’ve been worrying about the Next Pandemic since we still never took the kind of systemic actions we needed against the Last Pandemic (like, broad clean air initiatives). I’ve expected it would be soonish because of climate change. This one comes from dreadful agricultural practices, though. My understanding is that cows got infected because they’ve been fed chicken crap en masse. The dairy farmers hoped this would mean antibiotics and steroids in the chickens doing double duty once they enter the cows, but it actually just made an outbreak.

I’ve had lots of bird flu articles tagged in my RSS reader. A couple other recent articles are not really alarming in regards to humans: Barn cats dying when they got bird flu from raw milk (Ars Technica), and a dolphin previously getting bird flu (Gizmodo).

But Digby’s Hullaballoo noted that it’s likely there’s already a lot of bird flu in human dairy workers. We aren’t testing for it seriously yet.

~

Sorry, I know that subject is grim. But I don’t feel like we should be afraid right now — just watchful. We are little dudes on a big planet. In our society, we are little more influential than cells in a body.

Balancing the grimness of More Pandemics is the fact we are learning a lot in medicine right now. Smithsonian Mag talks about personalized melanoma vaccines. It really seems like cancer tech is moving forward in leaps and bounds.

Plus, patients in the NHS are getting a life-changing drug for sickle cell anemia. (The Guardian)

On a not-medical level, the G7 nations have agreed to (mostly?) stop using coal by 2035. (Smithsonian Mag)

It doesn’t feel like we’re moving forward, but we really are. All the good and bad stuff happens at the same time. It always has.

~

What’s more high-tech dystopia than a drone designed to cover graffiti? (also Gizmodo)

A lot of things, honestly. I’m not talking much about college protests here because I don’t have any particular insights to add, but those are incredibly dystopian.

This article on Balloon Juice has a lot more useful stuff to say than I could muster.

Students wanted to be heard, and taken seriously, and you can do that independently of the ask. And it builds trust in the adminsitration so that if you do need to go to the demonstrators about a safety concern, they are more likely to believe that you have an actual safety concern. Instead of asking them to take an encampment down, can we move you over here where you’re still visible but aren’t blocking an evacuation route. We didn’t like the encampment, but the whole point of the encampment was that we didn’t like it. Not asking them to take it down is a soft way of saying ‘we respect your decision’. Trust has to be earned, and re-earned with every generation of students.

Basically it’s a perspective from a college administrator talking about what administrators can and should be doing about the protests on a very practical level, and none of it involves cops arresting students.

~

On the bright side, that 1864 anti-abortion law in Arizona has already been repealed. (AJE)

I saw lots of coverage of the law’s passage. I kinda hope I will see coverage of its repeal too? I just think folks need to know when the really egregiously bad stuff gets kicked to the curb.

~

If Biden’s administration has its way, cannabis is getting reclassified on the federal level. (NPR)

From the perspective of someone who is generally pro-weed but cannot have a healthy relationship with it:

Anything we can do to rectify the harms of the drug war is good. We need to stop punishing people for use of herb. We especially need to get people out of prisons for cannabis-related offenses.

But there’s probably gonna be a lot of cannabis use disorder for a while as we reclaim our social memory of safe cannabis usage. I won’t be the only person who bakes herself into a stupor, discovers you can get COPD from that, and has to quit the thing. A number thrown around in recovery groups is 1/5: that is to say, 20% of people can’t have a healthy relationship with it. It’s a lot like alcohol. Some folks drink lightly — no big deal — and then there’s people like me, who can overuse anything.

I predict there will be a dramatic spike in cannabis use disorder because it’s often marketed as a wonder drug, totally harmless. Give it a decade or two to start settling down and get treated with proper respect.

~

On a lighter note, a man has lost his emotional support alligator. (The Guardian) Someone let the gator loose while the human was elsewhere.

I just really, really don’t think humans should be keeping alligators as pets on any level. I’m sorry if the dude is sad. I think the gator is probably better off freed, though.

I took my Little Sunshine to the art museum this weekend. Really, my spouse took kiddo to the museum; I came along and spent some time sketching the art while Spouse chased Sunshine around the exhibits. We only spent about an hour in total. Sunshine wasn’t as impressed by the changing exhibit this time as he was last time. I get it: last time, there were some really cool resin structures, wooden sculptures, and a room with videos projected on tumbleweeds. He liked the theme on immigrant heroes too. This time, it was just a lot of old-timey sketches and paintings.

The current exhibit was pleasing to me, though. It’s a lot of art drawn & painted by a man who traveled around Nevada and California around the turn of the 20th century. It’s always really cool to see very-familiar places a centuryish earlier. Some things haven’t changed all that much, though all the towns have grown. It feels especially cool to sketch something sketched by a dude who hasn’t been around in a hundred years. I like his earlier art. I like seeing my Nevada through his eyes.

I wonder if Sunshine will grow to have any Nevada pride. He is in a particularly rebellious little place where he prefers to identify himself by his Italian heritage (which, to him, means his dad’s side of the family). He associates America with a lot of the terrible political stuff that he’s seen in his limited memory, and he doesn’t want to even be Italian-American. Apparently he deliberately misspeaks when doing the Pledge of Allegiance at school too. I recognize a lot of myself in this, of course. One of my middle school teachers shepherded the law requiring we do the pledge in school. I blame(d) it on her. And I spent my school career refusing to do the pledge on account of Free Speech.

Over time, I’ve softened to Nevada, and I have more historic context on America that makes me feel…neutral? Aggressively neutral. It’s taken quite a while to get there. It means I’m much more entertained by an exhibit sentimental to historic Nevada than the 9-year-old clone version of myself.

I loved museums at his age though. I still do! I spent so much time at the state history museum. I’m further from that one now, but I did take my kids to the kids’ science museum a lot, and I’m happy to make the art museum a frequent visit for my little guy. I love watching him grow like this.

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I spent a while watching a lot of TV, but I’ve mostly dried up on TV shows I need to watch at the moment.

My family lost their enthusiasm for the Greatest Show Ever, Doc Martin, so I’ve taken a break from episode synopses after finishing season 1. It’s always fun rewatching the beginning of a long-running show right after I finished it. I especially can’t resist doing this with Community, where the ending has a different cast and enough years between seasons that they age quite a bit. It’s sorta sad to think that this is going to be less common from this era of television; we just don’t get very-long shows as much anymore.

Lucifer was a much more uneven rewatch. It suffered dramatically when it was cancelled the first time; the truncated season that followed was actively bad. But the other seasons, once it was picked up by Netflix, planned for the shorter seasons and did a lot better. I still find that the switch in tone from its darker, more procedural first season to a family-oriented soap opera by the end just doesn’t suit my tastes. It does have a ridiculously romantic conclusion to the show. It ends superbly and thoroughly.

I’m currently watching Fallout, although I initially gave up on episode 2. It was just so slow. Even the action scenes were slow! But after episode 3ish, the lengths of the episodes get shorter, improving the pacing, so I don’t mind it as much. I’m not fond of most characters. I think I just don’t like this specific flavor of post-apocalyptic milieu, either. It strains credulity in a way that doesn’t make me want to suspend disbelief. That said, I’ve been enjoying all the filthy Ghoul fanfic. I like Walton Goggins! But I’m not remotely attracted to him! Until he’s a disgusting rotten noseless walking corpse doing weird rope bondage and fetish stuff with the young woman avatar, I guess. Monsterlovers win again.

I’ve also been playing tons of Fallout Shelter again (a mobile game where you build and maintain a vault), so it’s kinda fun half-ignoring the show while tormenting my lil vault dwellers. I couldn’t get into any of the other Fallout games, though. The franchise just doesn’t click with me.

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In news relevant to perhaps only my 9-year-old, legendarily litigious Nintendo went after Valve and Garry’s Mod has to remove 20 years of Nintendo-related content. (Ars Technica)

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Estonia has to close one of its airports for a while because of GPS jamming, which might be coming from Russia. (Lawyers, Guns, & Money)

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Here’s an interesting, in-depth essay about the aesthetics of fascism and the rise of the current fascist movement seen in media. Thanks to Simon McNeil for taking the time to write this out.

I love Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism essay for its clarity, and this author also appreciates it.

Fascism is largely an aesthetic position. “Even though political regimes can be overthrown, and ideologies can be criticized and disowned, behind a regime and its ideology there is always a way of thinking and feeling, a group of cultural habits, of obscure instincts and unfathomable drives,” Eco says, and these cultural habits, these obscure instincts and unfathomable drives aren’t a political program exactly, they’re not an ethic nor even an anti-ethic. Rather, as I discussed in my essay on the concept of degeneracy, much of what underpins fascism is a sense of what is beautiful and, more critically, what is ugly. The fascist is, at the root of it all, somebody with an exceptionally powerful revulsion for ugliness and a very specific set of criteria for what makes something ugly.

I appreciate anyone who tries to break down Ur-Fascism a bit because it’s a very dense essay. A lot of the best anarchist reading is challenging, which sucks, but is kind of inevitable. The reasons for arriving at an anarchist position require understanding a lot from history and philosophy. This is one of the great challenges of social reform, in my opinion: the aesthetics of fascism will always be much more accessible and easier to market.

Anyway, there’s a lot more to the post than that, so it’s worth chewing on.

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Trump is a powerful, virile strongman who cannot possibly sit in a cold courtroom because he’s old and fragile. (Digby’s Hullaballoo) This contradictory behavior is fully in line with the Ur-Fascism essay, if you ever get around to reading it.

Also from Digby: The unions are supporting Biden.

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Nixon was advised to start monitoring CO2 levels back in 1971. (Ars Technica) We know that didn’t happen. Are you surprised?

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I haven’t touched on the wave of massive student protests in support of Palestine, but it’s very interesting how it gives me perspective on a lot of contemporary American history. Here’s a bit about current protests from The Guardian. AJE shares photos of historic student protests at American universities.

I grew up only hearing sympathetic narratives surrounding student protesters. Now I’m hearing all the vitriol and activist loathing that fed into brutality against those protesters in modern day. History sure is a lot more nuanced when you’re living it.

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Unsurprisingly, Idaho is seeing a lot of emergency flights for pregnant people. (NPR)

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The Guardian pins long COVID cases in England and Scotland to about two million people.

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Not cool at all: Grindr shared the HIV status of its members with third-party companies. (Ars Technica) I can’t even begin to put my utter revulsion into words.

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I’ve been keeping an eyeball on Javier Milei’s rise in Argentina since I started doing these Sara Reads the Feed posts (scroll down the post a bit). The tl;dr is that he’s a bad-haired far-right populist. Massive protests against his austerity measures have felt inevitable, so here are some photos of protests against university cuts from AJE.

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Thank Horus that George Santos dropped his current run for office. (The Guardian) The guilty pleasure of a hilarious sassy gay Republican grifter really does belong in a sitcom, not on the government payroll.

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Jennifer Aniston is working on a remake for 9 to 5. (Variety) I’m going to remain neutral on this for the moment. It’s not a movie that demands remaking, but the message is sadly just as relevant now, and I support women getting up to shit. I guess I’ll wait to see how it goes.

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Warm sibling bonds in early adulthood make for better health and happiness as you age. (NPR)

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I really consider this one of the less threatening uses of AI, since it’s so targeted and specific, but… Someone tried to frame a coworker by making an AI generated version of his voice say bad things. (Ars Technica) It’s remarkable because we’ve all seen this coming. And it requires a very low level of technological expertise to do it. Yet it’s also very easy to trace if someone isn’t tech savvy (the dude wasn’t using VPNs and whatnot), and its impacts are extremely local. The environmental damage of AI generation is much further-reaching. That’s not even considering what it does to the labor market or the quality of output it produces.

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Smithsonian Mag talks about the marriage practices of the ancient Avar empire. This was a society where widows were generally remarried within their husband’s family — like, her husband died, so she remarried his brother.

The Avars, once a nomadic people, migrated from Central Asia to Eastern Europe in the 6th century and conquered significant territories, including parts of present-day Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria. At one point, their fearsome empire almost took control of Constantinople. […]

In their analysis, the researchers discovered that Avar women had more diverse DNA backgrounds than men. They also found that while men were buried with their mothers and fathers, women’s parents were not found in the same cemeteries.

This leads the experts to believe that Avar culture practiced patrilocality, in which women leave their communities after marriage and relocate with or near their new husband’s community. The study also shows that women shared a “steppe” genetic ancestry (where the Avars originated), meaning they were likely not part of a conquered people.

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Apparently the MCU isn’t having a hard time because it’s movies sucks, but because the kids don’t support them properly. (Variety) Yeah okay lmao.

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The Guardian shares award-winning crab jokes. lol irl.

Also from The Guardian: Giant pandas are getting a residency at the San Diego Zoo! Americans looove it when China lets us borrow pandas. We love pandas.

Did you know the outside world exists? The weather has been so nice, I’ve been rediscovering this for myself. I’ve taken a few longer walks (around an hour) in April heat, which is 70-80f, and about perfect.

My Big Dog has needed to revisit some of his training lately too. He’s really bad about fence fighting, which sounds more dramatic than it is…he just lunges so hard for fences and makes these horrible howly-yelpy noises at dogs on the other sides of fences. This is a totally common behavior in dogs. They get really frustrated by leashes/fences preventing them from socially normal behaviors. But it’s causing him a lot of angst, making him difficult to walk, and honestly puts him in danger because a pitbull can’t look bad like that.

Luckily he is a full peanut butter marshmallow. He’s taking to his training reminders well. So far, it’s all good experiences, and that’s my goal.

I’m also making really good progress on editing Fated for Firelizards. I’ll probably push an itch.io update with some new art and typo corrections before the actual ebook arrives.

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In Tennessee, Volkswagen workers are unionizing. (Balloon Juice) Woo woo!

Meanwhile, Starbucks employees’ union efforts are facing the Supreme Court. (NPR)

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Apparently, the reason Cybertruck accelerator pedals are failing is because of…soap. (NPR)

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BookRiot breaks down how Google is diluting their News feed. At this point, most Google products are unusable to me.

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Unsurprisingly, pregnant women are increasingly being turned away from emergency departments in America. (The Guardian)

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Niger wants American troops out. We’re withdrawing. (WaP0)

I note this because, as an American, I really don’t know what the military is up to or where we are most of the time.

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Remember when Google’s motto used to be “don’t be evil”? They sure don’t!

Quartz: Google tells staff not to ‘debate politics’ after firing workers who protested Israel contract

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Bright Wall, Dark Room talks about The Sixth Sense. Is something in the water? I’ve been thinking I’m long overdue a rewatch on this one.

[I]t’s also a meditation on something deeper than a cleverly crafted gotcha moment. It offers up a sympathetic, often harrowing examination of how children handle the things they see but can’t process. It reminds us that childhood can be magical, full of sights and sounds that don’t even seem possible. It can also be terrifying, when you’re left to assign meaning to the parts of life you don’t know how to grapple with yet.

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We won’t be seeing Prison Architect 2 until at least September. (Engadget) The publisher, Paradox, has been having a bad year. I’ve heard extremely bad, unplayable things about Cities: Skylines 2 (also Paradox).

It’s fine, really. PA1 has been a disaster of bugs throughout its lifetime. Giving the sequel more time to cook is good. And I’m still playing PA1, so I’m not exactly hurting for another.

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A then-11-year-old kid in England uncovered fossils of Giant Ichthyosaurs. (Smithsonian)

Now a 9-year-old from Derbyshire has won a “gull shrieking championship.” His picture in the article is divine.

It’s all downhill from here, kiddos! Literally life never gets better than being recognized for your shrieking abilities and finding dinosaurs. Literally.

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Am I reading a science article or watching The Thing again? Some bacteria, including certain strains of E. coli, actually seek out human blood. (Quartz)

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The Film Stage highlighted movies new to VOD and streaming. I’m not in a hurry to see Dune 2, but I am actually excited to watch the Extreme Brain Candy called The Beekeeper. I might watch Immaculate too.

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I laugh lovingly because the hedgehog is okay now, but some lil dude got a bacterial infection and swelled up into a poky basketball. (The Guardian) I guess it hurts so I’m not laughing that much. But the hedgie is okay! I promise. We can laugh at the pics a little bit.

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Here’s a round-up from Digby’s Hullaballoo about how unhappy Trump must be during his trial. The tl;dr is that he has to listen to people talk crap about him and he can’t say anything. It’s almost as good as if he had to step on LEGO.

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Over on YouTube, Zack Snyder talks about how he wanted Tom Cruise to play Ozymandius in Watchmen. Tom Cruise, however, wanted to play Rorschach.

…I’m sure he did.

Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach is one of the greatest comic book movie casting moments in history, fwiw.

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An unexpectedly interesting read from The Guardian is this piece about blue jeans. Have you heard how they were made by Levi’s in America back in the Wild West days or what-have-you? Some historic paintings from elsewhere in the world may disagree.

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A Netflix algorithm axed ideas for a Knight’s Tale sequel. (Variety) First of all, if algorithms are making those kinds of decisions at Netflix? It explains basically everything. But I think it was right in this case. That’s so much Heath Ledger’s movie. How do you do a sequel that can only remind us how much it hurts that he’s gone, when Netflix mostly produces hollowly soulless algorithmic drivel?

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Settlers of Catan has gone solarpunk. (NPR) How do you expand without over-polluting?

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Smithsonian Mag: Extensive Desert ‘Lava Tubes’ Sheltered Humans for 7,000 Years, Archaeologists Find

As someone who has been writing about cthonic Dwarrow, I’m very interested in this. But I also think it’s interesting from a sci-fi perspective, since we’d need to live in tunnels (basically) to survive a place like Mars, which has no magnetosphere.

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Refinery29 introduced me to the term Gorpcore. I thought they were joshing at first, but it looks like the actual term.