• sara reads the feed

    sara sleeps on the feed

    It turns out I can’t get any movie-watching done when I spend my days at medical appointments, editing my book, and other things that require my full attention during the day. At night, I’m still watching Doc Martin, which is the greatest show ever made.

    I’m still pretty tired and disorganized right now. I have to pull back on caffeine a bit too, so my mood is dropping more now than it did quitting weed. Is it just me, or is caffeine kinda awful to quit? Worse than weed, anyway. Headaches, *dreadful* mood, so depressed and sleepy and sluggish…

    Somehow I’m also more anxious. Or maybe it’s just the depression being loud. I don’t know, my thoughts are no good.

    ~

    I’m working on a longer Jon Stewart Returns essay, but Comedy Central got very high viewership numbers from his return so he’s definitely not going anywhere. (Variety) Roy Wood Jr was smart to clear out.

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    Excitingly, a novel drug for combating severe food allergies has been approved by the FDA. (NPR)

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    In January, Tor published a book called Gothikana using AI-generated elements on the cover. (Publisher’s Weekly) They did a really good job making me want nothing to do with the book. I also don’t know if Tor is still on my bucket list publishers. I’m kinda over the whole thing.

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    Colossal has shared the beautiful, eerie world of Alexis Trice’s weeping animals.

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    The leads of Avatar: The Last Airbender’s live Netflix adaptation used to fight over napping room on the back of the Appa figure. That’s so adorable. (Variety)

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    Face filters can be a fun way to visualize ourselves as we are not. I used to like seeing aging filters. I look exactly like my beautiful mommy, which is very reassuring. This lovely lady saw herself as a lady for the first time thanks to genderswap filters. Heart-warming, genuinely. (NPR)

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    Morph will be nonbinary in the X-Men 1997 cartoon. (AIPT Comics) As usual, people will die mad about it. (TSFKA Twitter)

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    “With a mass 17 billion times larger than our sun, this black hole is the fastest-growing black hole ever recorded, Australian National University said.” From NPR: Scientists have found a black hole so large it eats the equivalent of one sun per day

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    Apple is going to make sure nobody can read our text messages except Apple, tyvm. Even when quantum computery stuff gets to be more a thing. (Ars Technica)

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    It’s nice to see previous generations of creators acknowledge changing formats with respect. Martin Scorsese is actually listening to his daughter, I guess? I don’t think he’s growing a *lot* but he’s growing so much more than many of his peers, and that’s cool. (Variety)

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    NASA is looking for people to live in its Mars simulator a while. Don’t get excited unless you have a master’s degree. (NPR)

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    The actor dog (dogtor?) from Anatomy of a Fall is SUCH a good dog. YES YOU ARE. YES YOU ARE DOGGY. YES YOU ARE. (Variety)

  • sara reads the feed

    Low-key grumpy commentary on currentish events

    I am so off-kilter. Has weed withdrawal gotten worse in the 2-3 week mark, or is something else funky going on? There’s so many things going on, except being productive. Maybe PMS. Maybe grieving. Maybe cutting back on caffeine. I don’t know, I’m barely alive right now.

    It’s been a minute since I posted an SRF. I’m going to try to just include links that are “current,” but I might have missed updates on stories – feel free to let me know if I’ve got something old here.

    ~

    Mathematicians solve the “reverse sprinkler” problem. (Ars Technica) I didn’t know this was a problem, but it’s a pretty funny mental image.

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    Lindsay Lohan is getting a St. Paddy’s Day Netflix romcom. (TSFKA Twitter) I really liked her Netflix Christmas romcom, so I’m excited for this.

    ~

    There’s going to be a “Roddenberry Archive” available on the Apple Vision Pro allowing you to walk around various Star Trek locations. (Reactor) If you can’t spend $3500 on the face brick, you are kindly invited to gfy.

    (You can find pretty cool Star Trek ship-themed rooms on Steam, for free, if you have a plebeian face brick.)

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    I like very-prehistoric times. For “Out of Darkness,” which is a movie about paleolithic nomads, they made a conlang for their actors to speak throughout the film. It sounds interesting. (Variety)

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    There’s a GMO purple tomato that was created by mixing tomato DNA with snapdragon DNA. It’s a very pretty color and said to include some bonus healthy compounds that are sciencey wordy stuff. (NPR) They want to make people less afraid of GMOs, but I am not sure home gardeners are the people most worried about GMOs.

    ~

    Crypto lost a ton of its shine when its advocates realized it is, indeed, very very traceable, and thus not a great way to hide illegal purchases after all. Of course we are now getting around to expecting large crypto miners to report their energy use (Ars Technica), when we should really be looking at kneecapping AI-generated energy use imo. Really we should be hitting everything like this. It’s madly exploitative against humans and the planet humans need to live on. Like, it’s not the time for this, even if it wasn’t bland and mushy (commentary of mine off TSKFA Twitter).

    ~

    I still think Free Public College is a great idea, but people looked at the actual proposals from Warren and Sanders (Crooked Timber) and found that it would have pretty much just benefited rich kids as usual. Mostly because there was no real oomph behind the proposals. Entirely unserious. I guess this is the best the institution has had to offer leftist ideas in a while. :/

    ~

    Her Hands, My Hands reviews When Grumpy Met Sunshine.

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    The director of Prey, one of my fav movies of 2022, is getting another Predator-franchise film. (Reactor)

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    In Ohio, a pastor was housing homeless people at his church. The state said “absolutely fucking not.” (NPR) The pastor said “but it’s my religion!” The state said “okay but you have to do a bunch of renovation because we can’t have you doing something imperfect that we are totally disinterested in doing ourselves.”

    ~

    A Southern Nevada judge has been developing a court tailored toward working with autistic offenders. (NPR)

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    Vaccines are rad. (NPR) There’s now an ebola vaccine that halves the risk of death, even if you receive the vaccine after becoming ill.

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    Sneakily entertaining show that didn’t get traction is ending with four seasons + bonus episodes. (Variety) I watched the first season of Evil but fell off ages ago. It actually was quite good though.

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    I always like Psyche’s articles, and this one introduces “rhetorical figleaves” to add to the concept of “racist dogwhistles.” Blah on the subject matter but it’s interesting.

  • sara reads the feed

    Don’t be shitty, don’t have thoughts, don’t have glp-1

    I don’t have much commentary right now because my brain has announced it doesn’t plan to function today. Trying to grab at thoughts is like trying to grab laser beams in drifting dust.

    ~

    I’ve been listening to sahn this week. Her music is a chill, bittersweet vibe – one of love and loss. The mood is no surprise given that sahn is Chadwick Boseman’s widow, Simone Ledward Boseman. Imagine a more aurally sparse and grief-focused Solange that sparkles like morning light through a prism. Much recommended.

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    Florida’s manatees may be recovering. (NPR) We love a community of happy sea cows!

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    North Carolina healthcare plans are cutting coverage for GLP-1 products prescribed for weight loss. (Ars Technica) These shots can cost a ton of money. It’s important to preserve supply for diabetics anyway, but I foresee a world (which we may already live in tbh) where being medically skinny is entirely a class indicator, and the movers and shakers of world culture no longer have any motivation to support body positivity. I suspect we will move away from body diversity in pop culture, basically, as the ruling class continues use medications and surgery to trim down, while poorer people have medicalized weight loss dangled at a distance and are judged for its absence. So you know, business as usual in a society without a flat hierarchy.

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    Reactor (formerly Tor dot Com) shares a trailer for a National Geographic programme about Black people on the American side of the space race. Here’s the synopsis:

    The Space Race weaves together the stories of Black astronauts seeking to break the bonds of social injustice to reach for the stars, including Guion Bluford, Ed Dwight and Charles Bolden among many others. In The Space Race, directors Lisa Cortés and Diego Hurtado de Mendoza profile the pioneering Black pilots, scientists, and engineers who joined NASA to serve their country in space, even as their country failed to achieve equality for them back on Earth. From 1963, when the assassination of JFK thwarted Captain Ed Dwight’s quest to reach the moon, to 2020, when the echoes of the civil unrest sparked by the killing of George Floyd reached the International Space Station, the story of African Americans at NASA is a tale of world events colliding with the aspirations of uncommon men. The bright dreams of Afrofuturism become reality in The Space Race, turning science fiction into science fact, and forever redefining what “the right stuff” looks like, giving us new heroes to celebrate, and a fresh history to explore.

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    This isn’t the most recent article, but I’ve been saving it a couple days – it looks like we might have found Amelia Earhart’s plane? (NPR)

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    Lee Hutchinson was not amused by Elvis’s series, Masters of the Air. (Ars Technica)

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    Tom Selleck talks about how he was in over his head while appearing on Friends – on the comedy end of things, anyway – and how Matthew Perry helped him with funny line readings. It’s nice seeing people reminisce about him with such love. (Variety)

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    BookRiot shares 100 Must-Read New Books by Black Authors.

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    Here’s a fun article about weird virus-like obelisks found in the human mouth. We still don’t seem to know all that much about ourselves, huh? (Engadget)

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    I really hope Elon Musk is lying about sticking Neuralink in an actual human. (Ars Technica)

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    Are we at risk of another major entertainment industry strike this year? IATSE and Teamster Talks Will Open With Focus on Pension and Health Plans (Variety)

    In an unusual move, all of the “below the line” guilds — IATSE, the Teamsters and the other “Basic Crafts” unions — will join forces to collectively bargain on health and pension issues for the first week of talks in March, the unions announced Wednesday. […] Both contracts are set to expire on July 31. The unions have said that, unlike in previous years, they are not inclined to grant extensions. Bargaining with the major studios is expected to be contentious, though both sides took a significant hit last year.

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    I’ve been watching Will Ferrell shop around a documentary about a road trip with his friend, who is a comedian and a transgender woman. Netflix picked it up. Yay! (Variety)

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    The VFX team reporting to James Cameron on the Avatar movies has voted to unionize. Good luck comrades! (Engadget) If you have to make 2020s Sigourney Weaver into a blue teenage catgirl for a billionaire’s satisfaction, I hope you get paid well for it.

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    Reportedly, Justin Timberlake hates how Britney Spears’s older music keep beating his new music on the charts, and I just love it for him. lmao. (Page Six)

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    I am genuinely upset about this one. Google Search is getting rid of its cached page feature. (Engadget) It’s one of the most useful features that still has me coming back to Google. With this gone, I don’t know why I’d use this search engine anymore, period. Weird to live long enough to see the “don’t be evil” company become the villain and then become too shitty to even be worth such a word.

  • sara reads the feed

    Day One Actually Sober, ketosis, and blah blah blah whatever

    Quitting cannabis, so far, is absolutely 10,000% easier than nicotine. At least on day one. Day one quitting nic was like an itchy haze of random sobbing and shouting at people and tearing my hair out. So far, I’ve just kept remembering that I can’t vape and getting a little bummed because I miss being fucked up. But it’s okay, I don’t have to be fucked up. It’s a lot easier to switch between tasks and Do More Things and that is worth giving up the peace of vaping through my day.

    …well, BREATHING is worth giving it up, and the other stuff could be worse.

    Again: I have been at this for eight years, and before that (with overlap), I was an alcoholic. I don’t really know what a Sober Sara is like. Certainly not a Sober Sara who has been a grown ass adult for so long. I was quite a young adult when I was last Chronically Sober and not just California Sober. A lot of people keep telling me that I might not change much at all from this. Will I be the same as I was last week? Last month? Is there a different Sara who’s been snoozing under the weight of our happy green flower friend, waiting to perk up and blossom?

    It’s just so hard to imagine because I’m also really productive and full of interests when I’m stoned. Like, all the amazing things I’ve done in the last eight years, I did stoned. Being stoned didn’t let me do it, obviously. But it suppressed my energy (a desirable side effect for me, frankly) so I’m like…if that’s how awesome I am when I’m smothered by THC, how much more awesome am I gonna be the next few years when the fog is clear? Can I control the frenetic human-scribble energy of my psyche unconstrained by the sensory numbing of weed? Guess we’ll find out.

    ~

    NPR has an article about the medical applications of a ketogenic diet. I spent years on a ketogenic diet. I did experience a lot of benefits. But I also found it was incredibly punishing on my digestive system, isolated me from my family because I ate so differently, and fed into my neuroses around “clean” food.

    I think the conversation around ketogenic diets misses that it really should just be a medical diet. I really think the average person should not be on keto. If you are dealing with seizures that need a ketogenic diet – or schizo-affective disorder – then obviously the costs of medicalized eating are absolutely worth it. But eating shouldn’t be medical or even functional for most people. It *should* be cultural, emotional, and a source of relief. (Not talking about binge eating. I’m talking about just eating normal meals with people you love and enjoying food that tastes good.)

    The hormonal effects on women are not well understood, but there is reason to believe ketosis is not good for women (source: apocrypha). Also, ketosis is a stressful survival state. Your body will be more stressed, all the time. They call this “eustress” to mean that the stress is good for you…but think about how many other sources of stress are in your life, and ask if you need to be systemically stressed out *further*.

    This article is fine because it’s urging medical applications, but I can’t see “keto” pass my feed without panicking a little because the scientific/medical appeal of it really, really appeals to orthorexia, and I don’t know many women who aren’t worried about eating clean in some way.

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    I knew that 23andme had gotten hacked. I didn’t know they were going explicitly for accounts with genetic data associated with Ashkenazi and Chinese ancestry. (Engadget) Of course it has to be racist evil, it can’t just be more general bad behavior.

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    I didn’t realize Cracked was still around, but they published an essay from Penn Jillette, famously libertarian, explaining why he is no longer a libertarian.

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    Jessica Valenti reports that multiple states are trying to make it “trafficking” to take minors to states where they can legally get abortions.

    On the other hand, Washington State is trying to enable pharmacists to prescribe and issue abortion pills.

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    Al Jazeera English has a roundup of national reactions to the ICJ interim ruling in regards to the Gaza conflict.

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    John Oliver says that it’s really exciting to see Jon Stewart back on late night for an election year, but also, he thinks Amber Ruffin and Roy Wood Jr should maybe have the desk. I agree. (Variety)

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    AJE’s article about Panama’s “Little Hiroshima” was a sobering lesson in recent American history.

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    Sierra Space is experimenting with inflatable habitats for humans in space. (Ars Technica)

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    Variety’s interview with Suzy Bemba, a French actress in Poor Things, was a really interesting glimpse at the state of working in French cinema.

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    ElevenLabs was identified as the creator of the Biden robo-phonecall discouraging Democrats from voting in the primaries, and they banned the account behind it. Okay, have fun with whackamole, guys. Pandora’s AI box is wide open. Are we going to pretend that things like fake political phone calls aren’t the main reason this crap exists?

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    JD Barker, who came up in publishing because of a (distant) working relationship with Stephen King, was not protected by his faint friendships when he decided to ask for nudes from underage people on TikTok. He has been dropped by his agent. (Publisher’s Weekly)

    Genres outside romance aren’t always good about moderating bad behavior so I was glad to see the hammer fall swiftly on this one.

    ~

    Britney Spears fans are NOT having it with JTimberlake’s new nonsense. (Variety)

  • sara reads the feed

    creative Capitalization, disliking what you reap, and mid-budget victories

    is gen z aging faster than millennials? I hadn’t thought so, but… (link to X with my apologies.)

    i just thought they looked mature to me bc it’s fashionable to wear clothes/makeup that code older to my generation, while millennials dress young. i see so many gen z looking very well groomed with very mature makeup routines. gen z made Coastal Grandma a fashion. of course they code more mature, while a lotta millennials never aged out of jeans and a tee.

    it feels to me like Gen Z had to be more mature because Millennials just kind of rolled over and culturally infantilized ourselves as a response to the structure/judgment of our parents. it was regressive for us to be sloppy; it’s regressive against us for gen z to be groomed.

    also: gen z’s more cultivated appearance comes from a cultural era where their adolescences have been entirely online, as a brand, performing for other humans. their appearances may be cultivated for internet entertainment regardless of greater context. there’s upsides and downsides. i don’t think Gen Z got to be kids. that’s such a downside. but the upside is they’re actual grownups at grownup ages and they can probably run circles around millennials on almost everything except maybe navigating DOS. lol

    that said, i think gen z actually is older than we actually give anyone credit. i often think of my 13yo as Gen Z but a lotta places list them as the first of Gen Alpha, which means that Gen Z is all older teens and adults having families now…

    so gen z, if you’re tired of people talking about you, it’s almost over. millennials caught shit until a couple years ago and then they switched to you but they’ll switch to your little brothers next, don’t worry. duuuuust in the wiiiiind

    (As evidenced by the creative punctuation and caps, the above commentary was also originally an X thread I posted. A reply pointed out that Gen Z started vaping young and suffered a lotta stress, so that could be a cause, and I can’t argue.)

    ~

    I guess Katt Williams got under Dave Chappelle’s skin. (Variety) It’s telling that Chappelle’s reaction is to complain about the criticism broadly rather than engaging with the reason Williams chose to criticize him specifically.

    I’m sure Chappelle is right that his story is very sympathetic; nothing that has happened to him justifies spreading hatred.

    “Hurt people hurt people, but I am a hurt person that never hurt people, and he does it all the time: ‘Fuck this one, and fuck that one, and fuck this one,’” Chappelle said, impersonating Williams.

    Yeah so basically we can’t expect Chappelle to change any time soon. He’s never hurt anyone in his life.

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    Mean Girls has “only” earned 50 million in theaters, but its budget was 36 million, so everyone is happy. (Variety) Are studios realizing we want mid-budget stuff in theaters again? That this was a long-time sustainable business model for good reason?

    ~

    Since I’ve been doing some game design stuff, I found this Balloon Juice article on puzzle design really interesting.

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    Now this is quite a read. From Ars Technica: Convicted murderer, filesystem creator writes of regrets to Linux list

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    Netanyahu keeps saying exactly what he plans to do: He wants the Palestinian state to no longer exist. (NPR)

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    I’m disappointed that Comedy Central won’t be picking a new host for The Daily Show, mostly because Roy Wood Jr left the show for this reason. If Uncle Roy doesn’t like it, then I think it’s a terrible idea and they’re making the wrong choice.

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    A former NASA administrator is not impressed with contemporary commercial spaceflight standards. Hear hear. (Ars Technica)

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    Determined to ensure Indiana Jones continues being harvested for capital, we will be getting an Indiana Jones video game. (Engadget) Honestly, the game might be fine; I’m just two movies past wanting more from the franchise and sorta annoyed they keep going on with this.

  • sara reads the feed

    Bad sounds, international queer perspectives, and Jesus

    I’ve been married to my husband for fifteen years now (well, in a week) and I still get all like “omg!!!!” when I get to see him naked. I’m like. omg. He’s so hot. omg. He’s not wearing clothes. omg. play it cool. PLAY IT COOL.

    ~

    It still surprises me when I try to pay attention to how many “productive” hours I have in a day. It’s never as much as I expect.

    Mind that when I’m being productive in a focused hour, a lot happens in that hour! My maximum writing rate in an hour is about 3,000 words, which means if I wrote one of those little Harlequin romances at that speed, it would take less than a forty hour work week (theoretically) to finish it. Those lil dudes are around 40-60,000 words. So we’re talking maybe 20 hours to draft.

    Yet those 20 hours have almost never in my life happened all at once; the fastest I think I ever got out a good book from start to finish (outlining and editing inclusive) was a month, or four weeks. And that was absurd.

    So much of my time isn’t spent productively, even though it always feels like I’m pregnant with my current creative projects. It’s hard to think about aught else. But a lot of that thinking happens when I’m clicking around my news feed, reading articles. Or when I’m walking somewhere. I think and plan frequently. Yet I think the main reason it feels like I work *so much* (at my peak) and can’t find more time is because it’s just really Mentally Intensive. I feel every minute so the hours seem longer than hours spent curled up in my chair with yarn. And I just can’t do that very much! It’s been hard for me to do that more than an hour at a time, these days. (I’m rebuilding stamina.)

    What this is circling toward is saying I haven’t been posting feed commentary much because I bumped another hour or two of weekly productivity toward fiction. I am really determined to just *finish* all these outstanding projects I’ve got on my docket. Egregious is an ongoing passion project that I don’t mind letting sleep for weeks or months at a time. I’ve done it before.

    Just kinda funny to see how an hour taken away from Egregious means, like, three fewer posts here, but only another  chunk of chapter on the book.

    ~

    I have a problem with misophonia. This interesting Psyche article connects it to interoception problems, which makes so much sense. There is a lot of brain activity when “bad sounds” are bothering you. It’s very real!

    It also seems like it may be connected to (or alleviated by) mirroring.

    Kumar surveyed hundreds of people with misophonia and found evidence that those with more severe symptoms were more likely to say that they imitate the actions and sounds made by people producing triggering noises. Many of the participants said they often feel compelled to mimic whatever action is triggering them and that doing so brings relief, whether that’s chewing loudly or tapping their feet.

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    The Southeast Asian Anarchist Library has a thought-provoking post about the colonialism of “gay pride” and queer identity labels currently being used. It’s a dense read, but the insights gave me a lot of perspective on how some of this movement has mixed impact abroad.

    It seems the language of queer liberation is being applied in a way that still mostly serves to export American capitalism, and that is a *deeply* disappointing but helpful perspective to gain.

    ~

    Tor dot Com has informed me that we are getting a Highlander reboot, which I am DEFINITELY ready for. Henry Cavill feels like the inevitable casting. Is Adrian Paul still around? Oh heck a quick search says he’s only 64. We put 64-year-old men in action movies all the time. Can we have Adrian Paul?

    ~

    Ars Technica has an article talking about how fewer pollinators means that plants produce less pollen. Is it weird my first thought was like “omg it’s the way my hair produces fewer oils if I don’t use shampoo regularly.”

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    I really loved Niecy Nash-Betts’s acceptance speech at the Emmy’s. (Variety) Also, on a very shallow level, holy crap she is murdering me in that dress. She looks incredible.

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    Lil Nas X shouldn’t apologize for anything in regards to his J Christ track. (Variety) His expression of the Biblical stories is very pro-Jesus and anti-Satan. Like, there’s really nothing to complain about unless you don’t like a femme Black gay man being the one who is so good at Bibling.

    ~

    Balloon Juice talked to NYT Pitchbot, who is a Balloon Juice alumnus. Most of the interview is on Substack (so I didn’t read it) but I think you can get a decent sense of character and thought process from the excerpt.

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    The New Yorker has my favorite article of the week: The Abortion Provider Who Became the Most Hated Woman in New York.

    Restell was no mere opportunist; she genuinely believed in abortion. This much is clear from “To Married Women,” an essay-advertisement that functioned as a manifesto for her practice. “Is it not but too well known that the families of the married often increase beyond the happiness of those who give them birth would dictate?” Restell asked in one version, published in 1840. “In how many instances does the hardworking father, and more especially the mother, of a poor family remain slaves throughout their lives?” Abortion and birth control, she reasoned, were not sins but ways to cultivate health and human thriving. “Much of the suffering, misery, wretchedness, and vice existing around us can be attributable to our ignorance of the capacity granted to us for a wise end to control, in no small degree, our own destinies,” she wrote.

  • sara reads the feed

    Trolling my spouse, rewatching Dune, women who are bosses

    Day whatever, not even 8am, and I got a popup from Facebook about writing a misandrist comment, warning me about community standards. Whatever. Meta can’t handle my ~creative ~use of ~language.

    Pray for my spouse, though. This person has been putting up with me for seventeen years. And I really sincerely do everything I can to disgust him. I mean, I tell him the most unnecessarily graphic bathroom stories, using my full vocabulary and imagination – and hand gestures! – trying to gross him out.

    I can’t ever gross him out! He just stands there like “oh yeah” and offers sympathy if relevant. i’m like, “Did you just listen to the complete story that was EXTREMELY GRAPHIC about my bootyregion’s plight of the week?” or like “why doesn’t having my uterine cast wiggled in your face bother you?” and things like that.

    This guy is unflappable! One of my love languages in the past was/has been annoying people. I’m not gonna pretend it’s an endearing quality. I’m a youngest child, I learned that negative attention is usually as good as positive attention, and I have really tried to grow out of this with everyone except my husband.

    My world is a lifelong attempt to troll my husband into being grossed out, and he is such? a? good? sport? about? it? I think I get disgusting now and he’s just like “aww I love you too.” I just want to BOTHER him and he’s so UNBOTHERABLE and it makes it even more fun somehow.

    (It also means that he has been at my side during the most disgusting hospital incidents and nurses praised him for the care he gave me, which is just so romantic. I really don’t deserve him.) (I’m gonna go fart on his office chair and then tell him I did it)

    ~

    Having just rewatched Lynch’s Dune, I was absolutely astounded and delighted to read this overview of the half-screenplay Lynch wrote for its sequel. (Ars Technica)

    ~

    I’m in the mood to just rewatch stuff, not try anything new, but watching The Blair Witch Project yesterday kinda felt like a rewatch even though it was fresh. Amusingly, Dredd was a rewatch I’ve seen a *lot* before, but not in a long time, so it almost felt new.

    I sense I’m going to be going back and rewatching stuff from last year soon – maybe even things I’ve already reviewed. I think what I’ll do when I rewatch something I’ve already reviewed (and I don’t feel like I want to form a new take on it), I’ll probably just write a related essay, like I did with 9 to 5.

    ~

    On order to flag articles I wanna comment upon in Sara Reads the Feed posts, I *usually* just star them in my RSS feed reader, then go back to examine them later. Lately I’ve been doing a thing where I star posts that catch my attention in a “this is the state of the country/world/whatever” way, and then I do not end up posting/commenting because I don’t wanna actually think about it. This paragraph stands in the place of an article about a mass shooter, American gun owning habits, the erosion of our already dreadful justice system, prisons desecrating human remains, worsening child labor rights, and similar unpleasant information.

    ~

    On the bright side, surgeries for gender affirming care have a much higher satisfaction rate than any other surgery. (Assigned Media) Doctors would love to get some tips to help their patients with other procedures. This is actually, unsarcastically the future the gays want.

    ~

    Ars Technica shares details about an exoplanet with a “lava hemisphere,” which might be the coolest and scariest two words stuck together ever.

    Also from Ars Technica: You can now get “Those Games” by the guys who did Katamari’s remaster. Basically it’s the games in the mobile ads that look good, which you can never play, because the mobile games are not what they advertise. The Katamari remaster was one of my favs from last year so I do want this.

    ~

    Kristen Stewart says she won’t do anything else until she finances the biopic she plans to direct. (Variety)

    The way she talks about female storytelling piques my interest, though not without a knee-jerk urge to criticize. I’m feeling burned out on boss babes like Gerwig and Robbie. I don’t think Kristen Stewart is a neat comparison to them, though. Her queerness is something she can’t seem to hide to please the male gaze as much as the aforementioned women, and I just really sympathize with her awkward….everything. Maybe she’s a better comparison to Elizabeth Banks, who is a bit of a boss babe, but so messy that it’s interesting.

    It’s actually really cool to see KStew growing into her own as an artist and looking at projects that let her express her matured sensibilities. Also I’m still completely in love with her and I want her poster to hang on my wall so I can practice kissing.

    ~

    Lily Gladstone’s grace in handling complex conversations surrounding Killers of the Flower Moon is something to behold. (Variety) She just seems like a thoughtful, generous person, and it’s nice to see a grownup out and about on the awards trail.

    ~

    Valve seems to be changing its stance on fan projects. (Engadget) They don’t want TF2 ported to Source 2 and they asked Portal 64 to cut it out. Bummer. My Valve-loving aspirational game developer 13yo is going to be really disappointed.

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    They’re removing the dam on the Klamath River. That’s gonna be a big change through the area, I think? (NPR)