I made the featured image on this post a stock photo of a panda (thanks Depositphotos) because I’m grumpy and it’s harder to be grumpy around pandas.

~

Yesterday I thought I was calling Dean Phillips stupid on Bluesky, only to realize it was only a mechanical turk shilling for him. Then I felt really bad calling a mechanical turk stupid and I felt especially clueless for forgetting nobody ever stands somewhere they can catch the mud they deserve.

One thing I hate about Reality is the layers of protection between the people who deserve to get cussed at and me, the person who wants to cuss at them. I have a very narrow strip of humanity that I believe truly, in my soul, deserve to be cussed at, and yet another empty suit running an ego parade to agitate the base against the incumbent (who i don’t. even. like.) is someone who absolutely deserves to be cussed at.

But he’s not even doing his own dirty work, of course. I always suspect a blowhard like Dean Phillips (I hope he has a google alert on his name) is a bad actor benefiting from outside governments’ funding knowingly or otherwise. Knowingly or otherwise, the man is stupid, and goddammit I want to be standing somewhere I can tell him directly. I want to look that man in the eye (through my phone screen ideally because the outdoors? yikes) and say, “You are wasting everyone’s time and money and you are BAD FOR THE COUNTRY, stupid.”

Telling the ruling class that they suck is actually a really important civic duty.

Which is why they hire people to stand around and get told *they* suck instead.

I always know there’s a reason I keep myself reined in on my natural levels of grumpiness, and it’s because I always regret taking out my grumpiness on anyone. I like being a bit of a grumpy person. I just really don’t think the vast majority of humanity has earned it. Everyone (who isn’t Dean Phillips) is a potential friend and current neighbor.

~

I finally posted my review for Lucy. I had to edit it a few times before posting because I have *really* strong feelings about older men taking advantage of younger women, to the point I wrote entire fiction series about it. I managed to make things less rageful I think? Well, less expletive riddled.

I once knew an author whose fetish was transparently abuse against women; he often spoke of how much he loved seeing their strength by how they prevailed. How their bodies could be liquefied by the abuse, yet they would keep going.

This was an author I knew through a professional space. I looked around at his online presence and the fact his fetish was beating women was very obvious. It was in his art, his books, everything. Worse, he tried to involve everyone in his fetish. He always tried to turn forum discussions toward this violence and how hot it is for powerful women to stand through it.

I made him my personal project. I rallied support on the board and I wouldn’t stop commenting on everything he posted. I made such a public stink about this man fetishizing abuse of women, and trying to abuse women on the internet, that an extremely complacent white dude admin finally banned him.

And that admin then scolded me publicly because he didn’t like I’d put him in a position where he was forced to act. I told him he should be grateful I forced him to act like a decent human. And then I threw a forum party for the women who were safer *despite* the actions of *extremely whiny and complacent* men who were happy to enable this shit.

I have zero room in my heart for men like that. No patience. No quarter. They deserve to retreat in shame.

So I kinda gotta avoid that stuff when I can’t go flaming sword about it? Because I *want* to go flaming sword, but the forum situation was one place where I could actually be effective. I have no power against Hollywood directors. I am just some guy.

Hence Lucy is simply a bad movie by an uncreative fool who hates women and that’s gotta be where I leave it.

~

A review of Rebel Moon from Variety isn’t exactly enthusiastic. I don’t trust Variety to know genre well enough to tell the difference between a stale trope and an old trope executed in a new way. I’m gonna have to watch it and see what I think.

Zack Snyder is kind of an odd duck. I don’t think I’ve seen a movie of his I would necessarily call “good,” and I think we have vastly different opinions about humanity that leave us little room for overlap in taste. But his movies are interesting, if nothing else. I usually enjoy trying to figure out wtf he was thinking enough to watch em twice.

~

The Marginalian talks about being thin-skinned as a kind of permeable membrane that means we feel the amount of universe inside of us more. This is my kind of drug logic, I love it. Yesss just call me a walking biphospholipid membrane why don’t you

~

We, culturally, lost our dear parasocial friend Andre Braugher to aggressive lung cancer. Love for the Braugher family. Sooo much love.

~

A noteworthy portion of pandemic relief funding went to the arts. (NPR) I would be interested to know how much of that funding reached the working class.

~

I blogged about alloparents in a previous Sara Reads the Feed, and here NPR shares lots of heartwarming alloparenting stories from people patiently indulging white americans who didn’t know it takes a village.

~

NPR also reports that Prince Harry has won one of his cases against the British media.

~

This Tor dot Com review of A Study in Drowning sounds interesting, so I’m putting the review here to come back around and try the book later. I’m way more interested in books that have a supportive story about the artist and methodology, tbh. I’m way more interested in methodology than hooks.

That said, doesn’t it kinda suck how many of us have to put lipstick on our trauma and then market it to other people so we can make a living?

~

The Eyewall has the funnest read about blowing up tornadoes.

~

More from Carmack about classic Doom. (Ars Technica) He’s had a lot to say the last couple years, so if these insights are valuable to you beyond nostalgia, definitely do a googlin.

As for the nostalgia element? Listening to Carmack talk is like sitting down with an old computer guy who was programming using punch cards. If you haven’t had the privilege, I’ll tell you that you can indeed get grains of interesting information out of them, around an overwhelming onslaught of happy old nerd man just kinda…talking. The nostalgia is never enough to get me through it, lol. I say this with *enormous* love for happy old nerd men, several of which alloparented me from 18-24 years old.

~

Federal regulators might crack down on Starbucks’s union busting. (NYT)

~

Articles about an A24 Death Stranding movie keep coming across my timeline. I don’t think I’ve mentioned on Egregious that this is one of my all-time favorite video games against *incredibly* steep competition, like Doom. The cutscenes of Death Stranding alone form an outstanding flick, and they know it, so this will be an original story in the same universe. I’m totally open to it, but apprehensively so, as any elder video game fan approaches movie adaptations of the games we like.

~

Tor dot Com actually has a lotta good reviewers on board. I loved this read about Gene Wilder’s Wonka as one of the fey.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m pulling back on visits with my bffs caffeine and weed so my mood is sourer than hag testicles.

I think I’d been eating food that had gone a little funny. My sense of taste has honestly never been the same since I got covid in 2022 – although it did mostly return – and I’m never sure if food Actually Tastes Bad or if I just Think Food Tastes Bad. So I was eating bad carton eggs for a couple days.

I’ve discovered my digestion is tied to everything else in my body – basically if my digestion goes bad for any reason, *everything else* will go bad in a dramatic way. I had a *really* bad night two nights ago, and dodgy eggs would account for some of the issues. I am on lowkey gastric rest and reducing digestive stressors (like caffeine) so I will be okay.

I hope you’re in the mood for me to be grumpy about the news because I sure am.

~

Literally right now I am just kinda playing BGIII because existing is exhausting and I can barely move. Video games are the ideal distraction for a shitty Sara.

I made one of my book characters as a cleric, and we hooked up with Astarion, and I’m good now. I feel like life is good.

~

I’ve been haunted by this New Yorker article about so-called self-driving cabs ever since I read it. Did you know that those self-driving cabs without anyone visibly behind the wheel may (probably) still have a human worker actually hidden in a compartment inside the car?

~

According to Netflix’s streaming data, JLo’s about as much the star of 2023 as Margo Robbie.

It’s fun seeing Netflix release these numbers. Amazon would never do it for their book authors, but for…gosh, I was gonna say years, but it’s honestly at least a decade now…self-published and ebook-first titles have been vastly outpacing their traditional publishing brethren in audience. Indies could sprint circles around new releases from major household name authors sometimes, and nobody would ever report on it because those ephemeral numbers simply don’t count.

Efforts from various publishing forces have kneecapped this to a degree, but there are still indies that the greater world had never heard of making 6+ figures *each month*, completely dominating entertainment in many households, just like JLo.

And I bet JLo doesn’t compare to the viewerships of some independent youtubers or TikTokers.

Will there ever be a cultural reconciliation of this media environment, or is the money and power traditional media companies hold total enough to keep this shit second-tier forever?

I don’t actually have to care anymore, lol. I bounce off of everything popular no matter the distribution lines. The “entertainment media as social bonding” part of my brain is utterly broken. And since I’m only trying to serve my own creations to an audience of roughly 10 reliable buds, I’ve got zero horses in the game. Neigh? Nay.

~

Twitch walked back their thing about nudity a little bit.

My prediction is that it’s like Tumblr, where they got rid of nudity long enough to drive away all the interesting, disabled, queer adult creators, but they’ll let the porn bots back.

~

Trains in Poland were designed with ransomware and got bricked by the creator. (Ars Technica)

~

Since we learned the government has been spying on Apple’s push notifications without warrants, Apple now has the same policy as Google: law enforcement needs a warrant. (Engadget)

~

Variety asks, where are the major nominations for Ava DuVernay’s movie?

 

I’m working on a couple reviews right now that feel a little too big for my normal review format. Plus, they aren’t romcoms, so it doesn’t feel urgent.

Birds of Prey: The Fabulous Emancipation of Harley Quinn was the last movie I saw in the theaters before the 2020 pandemic shutdowns, and for that reason alone, I hadn’t revisited it in ages. There was just a big flip in my life shortly after it came out. Now I feel like I can’t review it without talking about Suicide Squad, The Suicide Squad, and Barbie, because the four movies are all part of Margo Robbie’s search for a big IP girlboss feminism outlet.

Lucy (2014) is another movie I saw in theaters. This one comes from the days where I would watch anything in the theater, and I didn’t know Luc Besson married a fucking child, so I thought seeing another action movie from the guy who made The Fifth Element would be interesting. Lucy completely baffled me in 2014. Even knowing I would hate it, I wanted to know what I missed, so I watched again.

I’ve now taken enough drugs and encountered enough rapist abusers to parse the movie, and I have a *real* angry review to write about it. I just don’t know where to start when I’m this disgusted.

Anyhoo those reviews will be coming at *some* point.

~

My mood is really negative today because I’m having health problems. I need to take time to reorient myself in love and peace because I’m also deciding to withdraw on Substances (namely mood-boosters cannabis and caffeine) so it’s going to be a lotta feeling real crappy for a minute. Right now, you’re getting the crabbiest read of the news possible.

~

Balloon Juice has a current covid news roundup. The tl;dr is that you should be masking again if you stopped.

~

Variety rounds up tributes to Andre Braugher from Brooklyn 99 cast members. My heart hurts, so I’m glad I got to laugh at this story.

“Insecure” showrunner Prentice Penny, who also wrote for “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” recalled an on-set memory between himself, Crews and Braugher: “He was so warm with us and then when a white person would walk by, he’d look serious again. He then leaned in and said ‘Gotta keep ‘em on they toes.’”

~

Brian Cox reads a poem by Palestinian teacher Refaat Alareer. Sorry for the twt link.

~

Guttation is one of my favorite things my plants do, and I don’t actually love this art. (Colossal) It feels meant to evoke gross-out feelings with the drippy look of the statues, and the amount of guttation depicted.

To me, guttation is a graceful thing, a happy thing my plants do when I’m tending them well. I have occasionally reached out my tongue to take a tiny drop of guttation off a philodendron leaf. I don’t poison my plants with pesticides or anything, and a tiny drop has a lot of flavors from something inedible, and it feels precious to be able to taste it. Or I will take the guttation on my finger and see how it streaks like a tear. Guttation feels sweet and intimate to me, but these sculptures feel loud, gross, and visceral–something I’d enjoy, probably, if framed by anything besides guttation.

~

Extremely rich man James Cameron is talking about his jerk-off project to people who just can’t wait to hear what extremely rich man is doing to waste money next. (Variety) Apparently Avatar 3 is going to be more complex. I assume that means he’s going to double down on being racist and tell an even worse story about it.

If you’d like to hear about how he wasted money in the past, there’s also an article about hiring short people to make his Titanic set look bigger. I feel like there’s a dirty joke waiting to happen here. I’ll get back to you later.

~

This article about ChatGPT getting “lazy” (Ars Technical) is thought-provoking to me, because marketing really, really wants us to attribute humanlike qualities to ChatGPT and it’s succeeding. We talk about large language models hallucinating, we conveniently like to pretend it isn’t stealing from everyone, and people keep acting like these things learn.

It’s similar to the fallacies that lead us to compare human brains to computers, when they don’t work similarly even a little bit. Psychological pareidolia is natural to us; we humanize everything instinctively. It’s adorable. Marketing is taking advantage of it, and we’re just letting them do it.

~

Variety again: Anne Hathaway is right to say that she couldn’t have done Barbie instead of Margot Robbie, though I think Hathaway does have the look/charm. She’s simply not on the girlboss feminist arc Margot Robbie has been. Literally only Margot Robbie, coming out of her experiences with WB as Harley Quinn, could have made Barbie the way it turned out, and people seem really happy with its level of engagement with gender issues.

They also note that Hathaway would have been Black Cat in Raimi’s Spider-Man 4, which means there’s no universe where we don’t get subjected to an extremely shallow portrayal of a feline-themed comic book character by extremely flat Hathaway, who is much more Barbie Comics than DC Comics. (No insult.)

~

Chain pharmacies are bootlickers who will give cops anything they want without a warrant. (Engadget)

~

“Ew, animal sacrifice from ancient cultures!” says the title of a blog published within a culture that lives off meaningless mass death. (Ars Technica)

It’s a good read after the title, though.

Ancient writings describe equid sacrifices in the Mediterranean, sometimes involving hundreds of animals, but there had previously not been much evidence to back this up. There were far fewer than a hundred at Casas del Turuñuelo, although most were equids. The ages of all sacrifices at their time of death were estimated by signs of wear on their teeth. Most were found to have been male working animals in the prime of life, and eight of them had wear caused by iron bits found in their mouths. This provides further evidence for them having been used for war, transportation, or agricultural work.

Something that stood out in Phase 1 was that the equids in that phase had evidently been sacrificed in pairs or at least positioned that way postmortem. The archaeologists suggest they might have pulled carts together before death. There was also an instance in Phase 2 where the necks of two skeletons were crossed in the center of what was once a courtyard. Whether this was part of a ritual associated with either a deity or the afterlife of a deceased owner is unknown.

Why horses, in particular, were sacrificed remains an open question. The researchers think there is a possibility that they were used in a funerary sacrifice so the deceased could enter the afterlife alongside their loyal companions. This has been evidenced in other ancient cultures, such as the Scythians of what is now Russia and Ukraine, who would sacrifice horses at a funeral. Whether this was the case for at least some of the equids at Casas del Turuñuelo is still a mystery.

~

The New Yorker spends more time reviewing Wonka than I would bother, and it sounds like what it looked like in the trailers.

~

My absolute favorite read of the week was this article about a mother helping her local addict community with harm reduction. It’s wonderful, meaningful work, and NPR handled it with great sensitivity.

Renae occasionally monitors illegal drug use at her home for Christina and a few dozen other people she’s grown close to over the years. It’s an informal, rarely discussed version of the controversial overdose prevention centers, also known as supervised consumption sites, where trained staff supervise people using drugs. Those clinics are endorsed by the American Medical Association and other leading medical groups but condemned by critics who say they sanction, even endorse, drug use.

Heavy but good read. Very human. Very loving.

~

Fun photos over here on Al Jazeera English: A new kind of quinceañera celebration — for Mexico’s elderly

A migraine has set in right behind my left eye. This looks to be the third day with the migraine in residence. I am grumpy, I don’t like anything, if you touch me I might bite you.

~

People are mad, but Sophie Coppola claims she tried not to make Elvis the villain in Priscilla. (Variety)

Well, if Elvis didn’t want a legacy as an abuser, maybe he shouldn’t have groomed and abused an underaged woman.

Maybe folks should be mad that culture has put us in a place to lionize abusers so that we feel compelled to take up defense of abusers when we learn they are abusers, instead of turning to embrace the survivors.

~

This day in labor history… (Lawyers, Guns, & Money)

~

Captive in a chicken coop: The plight of debt bondage workers (NPR)

Note that bonded labor is illegal in India, but persists.

Although the Indian parliament banned bonded labor in 1976 for infringing on human rights, it was never fully eliminated. Bodies like the International Labour Organization documented a reduction in the prevalence of bonded labor but found that it continued in various forms in rural areas, often targeting people from communities that were marginalized by India’s caste system.

…Earth’s changing climate forced more people to seek these “debt bondage” jobs, researchers say. When local harvests fail due to drought, workers on these farms may feel they have no option other than to travel to places where they can earn a living, even if that means they must agree to forced labor conditions.

And paying back the contractors is more difficult now as well. Record levels of heat may mean the bonded laborers can’t put in as many outdoor hours or may have to work at a slower pace… The sugar industry – India was the leading global sugar producer until last year – has been hit by an increasing number of droughts that have taken a toll on a crop that consumes a lot of water.

~

A Sinhala family drama called “Tentigo” is getting a Tamil remake in India, and the concept sounds amazing. You had me at dead guy penis family shenanigans. (Variety)

~

Verizon fell for a fake search warrant and gave a woman’s stalker her info. He traveled several states to get arrested outside her home with a knife.

I’m sure Verizon will respond with new bureaucracy and red tape, but none of that will matter. Cops are domestic abusers too, and everyone has an agenda of their own. Nobody should have access to this information. Privacy is critical.

~

Julia Roberts turned down “You’ve Got Mail.” She thinks that “My Best Friend’s Wedding” deserves a sequel. (Variety)

I don’t know that Roberts could have done YGM. She’s so charismatic and charming, but in a different way than Meg Ryan. I’d rather watch Meg Ryan performing mostly alone. She’s got this powerful physicality. Roberts is better when she’s opposite someone, imo.

MBFW could have a sequel that is an actual romcom, sure. Because MBFW was a black comedy taking a perspective on a villainous female archetype, not a romcom.

~

The FDA approved a CRISPR treatment for sickle cell, which is soooo cool. (Ars Technica)

~

Digby’s Hullabaloo brings very important news to our feed readers with the birth of this new baby monkey.

~

This Malaysian Oscar submission sounds rad. Puberty body horror? Gimme. (Variety)

~

Sorry for the link to Twitter, but having one’s funeral with people dancing in the aisles and Nick Cave performing is the only church funeral aesthetic I’ll accept.

~

Forced to become British: How Brexit created a new European diaspora (AJE)

The traditional view of naturalisation, the process by which an immigrant becomes a full citizen, is that it’s the final step in the journey to integration. “But in the case of Brexit and Europeans in the UK, the opposite happened,” says Nando Sigona, co-lead of the Rebordering Britain & Britons after Brexit (MIGZEN) research project. “People hadn’t felt the need to naturalise because they felt safe and comfortable as Europeans in Britain. Now they were forced to naturalise to defend themselves.”

The act of naturalisation, therefore, made people feel less “British” – or at least less “included” in the UK – rather than more.

Instead of citizenship being a celebration of belonging, many Europeans have naturalised in a state of resentment and have felt even like they’re doing it under duress. “[Our interviews with Europeans] have found a complete lack of trust in the British state,” Sigona says.

~

China is turning COVID quarantine centers into apartments for workers. (NPR) Even though China’s got a lot of *serious* issues as a state, I’m jealous of how they pull together massive public works and then have *something* to work with afterward. These flawed but tangible creations. It doesn’t feel like my government is even capable.

~

Ars Technica talks using sisal as a fiber for homemade menstrual products. You know sisal rope: we wrap it around the cat trees because kitties love to claw it. I imagine it’s not as scrapey when repurposed for application to the cooterial region.

Plus sisal is an invasive plant, so this is a good use.

~

Alas, Chuck E. Cheese is eliminating the animatronic team in all but 1-2 locations. (NPR) It makes sense, but it’s weird how they didn’t even mention FNAF in the article. There’s just a huge chunk of culture that explicitly associates the animatronics with horror now, and there seems to be zero engagement with that. I guess they don’t have to consider it a part of their brand identity if they don’t want to, but kids’ horror is huge, and I think they’re missing out by not tucking away the robot mouse for use in the Halloween season.