My family spent the first two days of this three-day weekend binging all four seasons of Star Trek: Lower Decks. I saw some fans on Bluesky talking about streaming ST:LD to boost numbers, hoping we can get more seasons, and my entire family likes the show so it was convenient anyway.

Man, I love that show. It’s truly our perfect Trek.

That is a lot of TV, though. I think my body is now couch-shaped.

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Most of the homeschooling I’ve done with my teenager is focused on history, media analysis, literacy, evaluating sources, and other things that I’m good at. We haven’t really been doing math at an appropriate level. Our family has some very specific oddball learning disorders, and trying to figure out how to do math around that has been a challenge.

I actually really like math, and I’m not bad at it. But most math concepts after the early grades can’t be taught naturalistically. You can work on numbers with wee kids at the grocery store, while cooking, etc. Getting into complicated stuff demands simply sitting down with paper to do the work.

This morning I spent a while making brand-new math worksheets so we can do maths this week. I used to make worksheets for myself, for fun (yes, I am a nerd), so all the formatting and whatnot is something I do easily. I’m using a common core workbook to provide the problems, but I’m eliminating repetition, and I’m simplifying explanations of the concepts that I find on reputable websites. Luckily there is lots of help in math for this age level. I just need to reshape it so that I can dodge the learning blocks appropriately. (I hope…)

I’m also adding in cat jokes to make it more relevant to my kid’s interests. And mine. Cat jokes are great.

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Someone made a Flappy bird clone for Playdate. (Engadget)

In other small consumer device news, the Kobo Clara Color looks like a nice e-reader. (Engadget) As an author, I really like Kobo’s book subscription reading service. I might actually end up getting a Kobo next time I’m shopping for an e-reader.

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While talking to NPR Books, Stephen King said he thinks you can’t gross out the American public — you can’t go too far. Playfully, I say that I’m really gonna test that with my book Insomniac Cafe. I don’t even know if publishers will wanna touch it. But I’m trying to be so, so gross. I think I can go too far. It’s one of my class skills.

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Memorial Day Weekend movies didn’t do so hot. (Variety) Furiosa’s not pulling people into the theater, and neither is Garfield, although the latter is better at it. I think Garfield is a pretty good example of the way that families with young kids will see basically anything kid-oriented because it’s just Something To Do with the kids. Still, the movie industry isn’t happy with the returns.

Talking about Furiosa, which was a perfectly fine movie, AI usage is cited for putting the older actress’s face over the younger’s. (Variety) Generally this is probably one of the better uses of AI, since it’s not theft, and it’s building off older tools that movies have been using since Benjamin Button. The usage was effective for me. It looked fine.

I’m still disappointed to hear it honestly. It’s a shame that they diminished Alyla Browne’s ability to be seen, since I found her to be my favorite of the movie’s two Furiosas. I don’t think having different faces between different ages has ever really hurt movies, period. It doesn’t seem necessary. Everyone knows that movies aren’t real.

Also: I thought they didn’t use Charlize Theron because she’d have visibly aged so much since Fury Road, but apparently they don’t mind changing someone’s face? Maybe George Miller just resented her (Vanity Fair) for being annoyed at her co-star’s unprofessional behavior. I’m totally Team Charlize on that. And if we’re gonna be de-aging Harrison Ford when he’s 120 year sold, why not woman action stars?

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AI continues to spread. I know Apple is planning more AI in iOS, and I’ve been wondering what that’ll look like (and whether it will lead to my total Ludditification). It sounds like AI emoji are one of the use cases. (Engadget) Eh, okay.

Right now AI seems to be a hot thing for the money guys, so I think that a lot of companies are slapping the AI label on things that are not explicitly the AI I’m worried about. I don’t want the IP-thieving, most resource-intensive AI. But I’ve been using autopredict and other algorithmic stuff for ages. I’m really not a total killjoy about tech. AI emoji are probably fine.

I don’t like the way Google’s formerly useful search engine is using AI summaries. Here’s an Ars Technica article about how to use a slightly better Google search again.

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South Park got into the whole medicalization of fatness thing lately, and they basically posed it as Ozempic vs Lizzo. To paraphrase: You take Ozempic if you don’t wanna be a fatass; you listen to Lizzo if you want to be a lazy fatass. (The Guardian)

Lizzo isn’t my favorite, but let’s be real. This woman isn’t lazy. She’s just fat. She’s quite active as a dancer and does lots of exercise. She’s one of the pop stars who really performs! You get skinny by eating less (sometimes way less) but exercise has less an impact on size than it does body composition.

Also, when my eating disorder was at its worst, I really did find Lizzo’s music to be a helpful part of my recovery. Believe it or not, it’s okay to like yourself at any size. Shocking, I know.

I suppose there’s no point in observing that South Park is edgelordy neckbeard nonsense as usual, but I just had to give Lizzo credit where credit is due.

Also, as you’d expect, the very-expensive Ozempic products are only a long-term solution if you keep taking them forever. (NPR) That’s not necessarily an issue. There are lots of medical conditions where you need permanent medication. But something like Synthroid and insulin are a *lot* more accessible than semaglutide products. Price alone is driving more Americans to avoid healthcare. (Quartz) Also, this class of weight loss drugs has potentially severe side-effects like gastropareisis (Quartz), so it’s not a solution for everyone.

So maybe we should stop shit-talking fat people for being fat and accept it’s okay to love yourself however you are. Concern trolling over health is basically never benevolent — or anyone’s business — and fatness isn’t as noteworthy a character trait as our society pretends.

If it helps, Psyche has an article about feeling more at-home in your body.

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Rich people really hate when others shame them. So they went to Congress and asked for anonymized private jet data. Congress said “Sure! We know who’s in charge here.” (Quartz)

Alocasia are on my shit list. I usually talk shit about my maidenhair fern, but I have shit aplenty for alocasia too. Basically I hate plants that act like they’re gonna die, then come back looking extra cute like nothing happened.

They’re emotional abusers, I’m telling you. Do they care if we suffer pain watching them die off again? NO, they do not. They just keep doing their little things like it’s a no-thing.

Maidenhairs will die off if you forget to water them for a second; alocasia like dying off because they need lots of plant food. They’re the most fertilizer-hungry plants I’ve got. If you’ve got an alocasia that seems incapable of growing more leaves — like, every time it grows a new one, an old one must die — it’s usually because they aren’t getting enough nutrients.

I’m terrible about remembering to feed my plants. My house has two levels, and the fertilizer lives on one level. So usually only one floor’s plants are getting fed at any given moment. Why not get a second thing of fertilizer, you ask? Or split the one into two? I keep asking myself that same thing.

I also keep asking myself, why not just let the plants die-die, forever?

There’s no tidy answer. I’ve been booting plenty other plants from my life, but these ones persist. Maybe the very fact they demand emotional reactions makes me more attached to them.

Spider plants stick around even though I also find them frustrating. Their roots drive out all the soil in no time flat, and then they act like drama queens because they’re always thirsty. You can keep them alive. They’re hardy plants. But they get all ugly if you don’t keep up-potting them. A single spider plant (and it’s never a single spider plant) is said to max out with a twenty inch root ball diameter. I don’t have room for this many twenty inch-plus size pots. I mean, I have room, but not the lighting.

Oh god, I need to upgrade my lighting, don’t I?

At some point it’s likely that my house will be nothing but a few stubborn euphorbia, a couple orchids, and ten thousand pothos.

And probably a single perpetually dying maidenhair hanging out with its spider mite-riddled single-leafed alocasia friends. Like some stupid asshole gang of stupid jerk plants. Stay gold, alocasiaboy.

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This sort of nonsense is why it makes total sense to me that baobab trees migrated across the ocean from Madagascar. (Smithsonian Mag) Plants can be so willful.

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Engadget: X-Men ’97 didn’t have to go that hard, but I’m so glad it did

I truly hadn’t expected to love X-Men ’97 as much as I do. Easily my favorite TV show of 2024 at the moment.

I don’t know why Beau DeMayo was fired (I don’t think anyone but DeMayo and his supervisors do), but it’s said he’s hard to work with. I have to side-eye that statement in regards to a queer Black man, but all right. What do I know? I’d love if they can sort through their issues and get him back on board. The gay-ass nature of X-Men ’97 is why I’m so attached to it. The fact it goes so hard is why it has my eternal devotion.

Brad Winterbaum compares the genocide at Genosha to 9/11 (Variety), and doesn’t mention the Pulse nightclub shooting (Out).

DeMayo has an influence on s2, and nothing to do with s3. (IGN)

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Cronenberg’s new movie, The Shrouds, sounds like an intensely personal piece about the grief of a widower. (Vanity Fair)

I absolutely adore Crimes of the Future for being such an intimate narrative about disability and chronic illness. I don’t know if I’m going to see The Shrouds for a while, but the raw honesty of Cronenberg’s work is hypnotic. Aging artists deserve platforms to share their truths. We deserve these projects to help us along with age.

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I feel fonder of Challengers in retrospect than I did while watching it. It’s available to watch at home now (Variety), and I hope lots of people will. It wasn’t a movie for me — but I think it was kinda fabulous.

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The New Yorker discovered that movies like The Idea of You (and romances at large) work for some people because folks like fantasy fulfillment. Imagine that.

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NPR asked what brings sibling close together. I am very very close to one of my siblings (obviously) and good friends with my sister, so I reflected on this a moment.

My answer is that caring about people can bring you close. I am a mess, and Sibling has always loved and cared for me through it. Sibling is a different kind of mess, and I love and care for them through that. We’re not codependent — but we know we can depend on one another when shit hits the fan. And we often have. That forges a unique bond.

With my sister, I’d say what has us close is communication. Being willing to talk through awkward shitty stuff means that we can be close even though we have not had an especially warm bond over the years.

It’s like any relationship: You choose to invest into it. The relationships you give attention will thrive. They must be watered and fed like those fuckin’ alocasias.

I had great friendships with older women when I was a young adult, and one thing a dear friend told me has always stuck out: Love is an action. It’s not a feeling. It’s what you do for and with each other.

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I used to go on a lot of cruises. I no longer do. There are so many reasons — human rights concerns, ecological damage, safety issues — but one of the big ones is that cruise ships are not humane about illness. If you get sick, you can get dumped anywhere. And if you need an emergency evacuation, you may not be allowed to leave until they’ve over-charged your credit card to pay their medical bill. (NPR)

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Disneyland performers have voted to unionize. (NPR) Good luck! I hope they get every single one of their needs met.

Donald Glover and Wyclef Jean have been promoting Google’s AI initiative. (Quartz) Apparently using artists to promote it is meant to get ahead of accusations that AI is bad for artists. This deal doesn’t make me feel like AI is more acceptable; it makes me like those artists less. Normally I have lots of Childish Gambino on my writing playlists, and since reading this article, I’ve just been going “ugh” and skipping past it when he comes up.

I make no secret of my anti-AI stance. There are just so many reasons to be opposed to it.

To the best of my knowledge, none of the AI tools have datasets where the included data came from consenting people. Companies tend to do a lot of foggy language surrounding their data usage to make it hard to know whether your stuff is getting used, and it usually *is* getting used, as with Slack. (Ars Technica)

Even Adobe, who’s been offering people money for video clips, is mostly working off of material which may be legally indefensible. (Hollywood Reporter)

But behind closed doors, companies are warning that the way most AI systems are built might be illegal. “We may not prevail in any ongoing or future litigation,” states a securities filing issued in June by Adobe. It cites intellectual property disputes that could “subject us to significant liabilities, require us to enter into royalty and licensing agreements on unfavorable terms” and possibly impose “injunctions restricting our sale of products or services.” In March, Adobe unveiled AI image and text generator Firefly. Though the first model is only trained on stock images, it said that future versions will “leverage a variety of assets, technology and training data from Adobe and others.”

Beyond that, it’s so, so bad for the planet. As I’ve previously shared, a ChatGPT prompt uses 15x the energy of a traditional web search, (Quartz) and some experts say it’s more complicated than even that. (Bluesky)

I also just don’t understand why people want to use this stuff to replace human-made artwork. The act of creation is a solid 90% of the reason why stuff is good! Most of the magic occurs between artist and art. Whatever your favorite painting, I guarantee there is a lot more of a relationship between the painter and the work than you, who is looking at it. There’s the skills it took to get there, the techniques, the place they did it, the sensory experience of creation, the thoughts and feelings of making things come together.

Frankly, everything AI produces is either bad (or hews closely enough to stolen material to be good, but arguably plagiaristic). It’s *not good* at what it does. The best work they promote has, at best, a sort of loopy dream logic that doesn’t stand up to any degree of scrutiny longer than scrolling past it real quickly on your feed.

Nicole Thoughts Stained With Ink has a more comprehensive publishing-specific post about her anti-AI stance that I appreciated reading. Like she says, there are plenty of good uses for AI that we can benefit from. AI assistants can be really helpful on myriad matters. You could say that the anti-motion sickness tech Apple is trialing is a kind of AI (Jalopnik via Quartz). Also, we should be using AI to understand complicated scientific concepts that are too difficult or labor-intensive for humans to work on. That stuff is good. The art stuff is bad.

Companies aren’t going to behave well of their own volition. Unfortunately, politics in America is extremely not ready to help with this. (Engadget)

“It’s very hard to do regulations because AI is changing too quickly,” Schumer said in an interview published by The New York Times. Yet, in March, the European Parliament approved wide-ranging legislation for regulating AI that manages the obligations of AI applications based on what risks and effects they could bring. The European Union said it hopes to “protect fundamental rights, democracy, the rule of law and environmental sustainability from high-risk AI, while boosting innovation and establishing Europe as a leader in the field.”

Schumer seems to disagree with finding that balance, instead stating in the interview that investment into AI research and development “is sort of the American way — we are more entrepreneurial.”

And in the meantime, Google is doing more to bury actual search results under AI nonsense, (Ars Technica) but Childish Gambino is okay with that I guess.

Every company and well-heeled musician isn’t all-in on this, though. Sony Music now prohibits AI developers from using its catalogue for training data. (Ars Technica)

I would love for there to stop being AI-related news so I can stop writing posts like these.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I guess I should have seen that coming, haha.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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