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.

~

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.

~

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)

~

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

~

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.

~

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.

~

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

~

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.

~

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

~

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

~

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.

~

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.

~

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.

~

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.

~

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

~

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.

~

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.

~

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.

~

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.

~

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

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

~

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

~

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

~

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

~

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.

~

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

~

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.

~

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.

~

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.

~

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)

~

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.

~

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.

~

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.

~

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.

~

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.

~

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?

~

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

~

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.

~

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