enuja

The flatness of AI writing

2026-05-01T12:58:38Z

Ethical use of AI is a huge topic right now. Is there any ethical use of large language models (LLMs)? If so, which uses are ethical? Were all of the current models unethically sourced? Before LLMs, would you have paid a human writer to do this work? But even if none of above were a problem, when you have AI right for you, you have AI outputs. And I agree with whoever said "If you didn't bother to write it, I'm not going to bother to read it."

Nonetheless, I have accidentally read quite a lot of AI writing, because it's filled up my FB feed, and it all seems to be junk. Junk in the sense that it doesn't feel mentally healthy to read it.

There are quite a lot of different types of AI writing, and the one that my friends tend to share most often is the uplifting historical story. These stories are very formulaic, and are both very boring and quite painfully long. And of course, when you look up the real history, they all get at least a few details wrong. But, maybe more crucially, they flatten so many different personal stories into one story.

Don't get me wrong: I think it's crucial to tell positive stories. But I also think it's crucial to tell factual stories, and to tell diverse stories. Not all histories start in oppression, hinge on the brave actions of a single person, and end with triumph. History, and people, are way more complicated than that. Reality matters, and uplifting stories which are all the same story, told over and over again, flattens us as humans.

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Wild Horse Speculation

2026-04-29T22:42:22Z

I have been watching a lot of horse stuff here on Facebook. I've heard a lot of ancient history on YouTube, and this lead to a question/speculation/suggestion.

Okay, so if...

1) Przewalski's horses are either ancient, never tamed step horses, or the initially feral, now wild, descendants of the first domesticated breed of horses, now entirely replaced by a later domesticated breed of horses.

2) Ancient step horses were much smaller, much more robust, and less vulnerable to many of the risks of death that modern domestic horses suffer from. The first uses that humans had for horses was eating them, and then eventually they were domesticated and used for pulling travois and carts. Horses were not initially domesticated for riding: that came later.

3) People breed both ponies and miniature horses, the latter of which are supposed to have the shape of big, modern, horses. Miniature horses pull carts in competitions.

Is anybody breeding a domestic version of ancient step horses? Either from the (highly endangered, so problematic to use) Przewalski's Horse, or from modern domestic horses?

I did a little bit of googling, there are some breeds of horse that are supposed to be like ancient horses, but they don't appear to be particularly common or popular, and I'd don't see anything about them being more robust than regular modern domesticated horses.

So that's my suggestion: horse people should breed some domesticated "step horses" and have them pull carts in breed association shows.

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Three books by women

2026-04-15T17:38:13Z

I was reading three books at once, and they're all non-fiction books, written by women who are older than me, published recently (two in 2023 and one in 2026) and each includes discussion about what sexism did in the past and how feminism is making it better, but otherwise these three books couldn't be more different.

Bitch: On The Female of the Species by Lucy Cook, 2023

I bought this one during independent bookstore day on 2025, and it's been enlivening my bookshelf since. I started reading it in March, but then decided that I wanted to read and review Solnit's new book, before I finished a book that's been out for years now. Lucy Cook went to undergraduate and graduate school in biology a few decades before I did, and her experience was one of being one of the only women, and of the theoretical biology being really sexist. I had a very different experience in college: one of the "new" books Cook refers to is "Promiscuity" by Tim Birkhead, published in 2000, which I read while I was an undergraduate. It felt a little embarrassing, at the time, to be reading a book designed for a general audience instead of a biology audience, but it had good biology in it, and it was a fantastically fun read.

So it's really great to read another general audience book, over twenty years later, telling me about how much sexism in evolutionary biology I'd missed, and really highlighting what's changed.

Bitch is also a fantastic book to read if you want people to come up and talk to you. The cover is amazing: it's got a female hyena biting off the "i" in the word bitch, and more people have commented on what I'm reading than with any other book I've ever read.

How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World. Deb Chachra 2023

Chachra is an Indian Canadian American engineering professor, she's using an explicitly feminist and worldwide perspective to think and talk about how our infrastructure impacts us, how it creates both peace and destruction, and both makes our lives easier and less equal. She writes quite a lot about climate change, unpaid women's labor, and so many other things about a equality and diversity.

The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. Rebecca Solnit. 2026

This is the only one of these three books I've finished so far, and I know a lot more about Solnit than I do about Chachra or Cook. This short book is one long essay, which I've already reviewed here, and has a much narrower focus than either of the other two books. It exists to convince leftists and progressive that change is possible, because significant change has already happened. The retrenchment is real, but so is the progress, and we must keep fighting to sustain an advance that progress.

Half of the world's humans are women, but when I was in school, the majority of books were written by men. I just googled it, and apparently that's not true anymore! Solnit is right: we are making a lot of real progress.

I just listened to a NPR story about how men need a little DEI, to get them into the caring professions like nursing, because men are apparently being employed at at lower rates than women, in part because the feminized professions are hiring more people than many of the masculinized professions, which no longer employee as many people as they used to.

It takes a while for my old brain to catch up to the changing present: as I was writing this, I was assuming that men still write more books than women, because that was true when I was younger, and I didn't hear or remember the news when it changed.

So maybe, in the future, I'm going to continue reading more books written by women than by men. That's a future I look forward to!

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Book Review: The Beginning Comes After the End

2026-04-13T19:13:52Z

The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change. Rebecca Solnit. 2026

I follow Rebecca Solnit on both Facebook and BlueSky, which is why I knew that her short new book with a pink cover, which is one long essay, was published in March. I went to a local independent bookstore to buy it, and I ended up buying a bunch of other books, as well.

It's a short book and a finely written essay, so I should have been able to read it quickly. But I'm just completely out of the habit of focusing on books, and it's taken me forever to finish this. But that's not a problem with the book: it's a problem with my current habits.

The book is a kind of a sequel to "Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities," which Solnit originally published in 2004. I bought "Hope in the Dark" last year, as a way to steel myself to fight back against the second Trump administration, but "Hope in the Dark," despite its updated chapters, felt quite dated.

"The Beginning Comes After the End" is absolutely current. And extremely hopeful, without being blind to the problems that exist in the present. Solnit's basic argument here is that progressivism is winning, and Trump and other very serious, deadly retrenchments against progress are the dying spasms of the old system. Solnit is not saying that future progress is inevitable: she's saying that there has been progress, and we can successfully fight for more progress.

You don't have to have read "Hope in the Dark" before you read "Beginning," so maybe instead of being a sequel, it's more like a replacement. If you've read "Hope": great, this is an update. If you haven't read "Hope": great, this is very much a stand alone argument. Either way, read this book, and don't worry about the old one.

"Beginning" is full of well-constructed language and pithy descriptions, such as calling Richard Dawkins an "evolutionary biologist and polemicist." Solnit writes quite a lot of different types of non-fiction. The language here is not nearly as metaphorical and poetic as in "The Faraway Nearby" and "A Field Guide to Getting Lost," but it is still extremely well written. It's just more practical and less theoretical and experimental and poetic. It's the perfect writing style for an essay trying to convince as many people as possible.

"The Beginning" was somewhat challenging to read, in the sense that it confronted me with things I disagree with. Solnit starts the book with the experience of being at a land back ceremony, and one of her major points is that we as a society are starting to value and learn from indigenous ways of thinking and acting, which I agree with. However, Solnit also seems to be arguing that indigenous systems are inherently more environmentally good and less exploitative than Western systems, I don't agree with that generalization,* and Solnit didn't change my mind. She didn't even try, actually. Because the point of the book is to convince the reader that the world is fundamentally changing, not to convince the reader of details or the correctness of these large changes.

If you don't believe in anthropogenic climate change, if you don't think feminism is correct and crucial, if you don't believe in DEI, there is nothing in this book to change your mind. Because this book is for people who are already on board with the progressive agenda, and it exists to help push progressives to action by convincing us that action works.

And it's not blind optimism or ignorance of the challenges of current reality. It's difficult to read in that it talks about a lot of sad things from the past and the present. But Solnit brings up the bad things to show how many of them we've fixed, and to convince us to keep doing this difficult, important work.

*On average, I think that systems that have lasted a longer period of time are more likely to be sustainable, but indigenous system change over time, and historically some indigenous groups have destroyed their environments and collapsed their societies. Indigeneity is not inherently sustainable, but all long-lasting societies must learn to be sustainable, or they will not last long.

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The '20s, past and present

2026-02-28T12:48:18Z

"...black and white, slapstick... it is not from the 20s, it came out in 2024." (Heard on the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast.)

Friend, we ARE in the 20s. I really did hope that Springsteen's Streets of Minneapolis (which calls this the winter of '26,) and the fact that we're so far into the 21st century, would lead to us being able to call this decade we're more than halfway through "The Twenties." But, no, apparently not.

In the 1920s, a century ago was 1820! I'm sure that didn't feel recent to most people, but I can pull up a Buster Keaton silent film on YouTube in seconds flat. I've dressed in costumes as a flapper, we think of the booming twenties as a very relevant cultural touchstone.

I've been thinking of contemporary society as moving extremely quickly. I keep saying: "We live in the future," for so many reasons, and mainly as an alternative to saying that I feel old. Because the reason that it feels that I live in the future is that society, and my everyday life, and my bad habits, have changed so much from when I was in my twenties. Doom scrolling did not used to be a thing! I didn't used to be able to video chat with my family across the country, or take and send pictures with great ease. I didn't used to have to identify writing and visuals as AI generated.

So yes, technology is changing very quickly, but also, I think we feel more viscerally connected to the 20th century than people in the 20th century did to the 19th. Because we have so much really good information from the 1920s that is visceral and easy to access, and is a big part of our cultural background.

So I guess I'll have to give up on my desire for the 21st century to ever use decade labels with only two numbers. It's just not a thing that's going to happen. I've been waiting for it to happen since the turn of the millennium, but I'm not making fetch happen. Apparently, even Bruce Springsteen can't make fetch happen.

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Disagreement and coalition

2026-01-26T16:07:58Z

My social media feeds are almost entirely about snow and about federal agents killing citizens. As are my own postings.

A fair number of the posts about agents of the state killing people have strong positions and whether "defund the police" or "abolish ICE" are the moral or strategic position. Some people feel very strongly about this, along the lines of "If you don't agree with me, we can't be in a colilition together." And that's the real mistake.

What's important to me is what makes real, concrete difference on the ground. I want there to be fewer deaths perpetrated by the state, more peace, more freedom, more joy, more health. If defund the police is the correct moral position, but reform the police is correct strategic position, and I'm all for reform the police as a political strategy. My own suspicion is that "defund the police" has failed over the past 5 years to materially decrease state violence, but that "abolished ICE" might be a winning strategy going forward.

I'm really bad at political strategy, and I don't understand the mass behavior of humans, so I gladly defer to the experts on these strategy decisions. But I am very strongly of the position that we're going to need a very large mass movement to defeat this immoral regime, which means this coalition is going to include a lot of people who strongly disagree with me on many issues. And that's an actively good thing, not just an unfortunate practical result of reality. The ideal future will include people who strongly disagree with each other on some issues working together on other issues, and to improve society at large.

It's not a bug, it's a feature. We can disagree on some things, and work together on other things.

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Surprise Snow Squall

2026-01-15T21:29:43Z

Yesterday's surprise snow squall was, well, a surprise. Apparently, it showed up on weather forecast models around midnight, and the possibility of a snow squall was not well known in salting and snow shoveling circles, nor to the rest of us. Many people woke up to blizzard conditions out their front windows, or got caught unprepared while running or walking or driving. The cities' salt trucks, which are usually out well before a storm, were not out and about until well after the squall.

Just as a summer thunderstorm squall line can be difficult to predict, so can a snow squall.

Normally I like commuting during snow, but I'm super happy I finished my pedestrian commute before the snow squall hit yesterday morning. Because I hadn't yet used them at all this winter, I did not have my Yakx Trax in my backpack yesterday. My walk home was slow because all the sidewalks and the streets were very icy. That's what happens when nobody salts before the snow comes.

For my pedestrian commute this morning my, I did have my Yakx Trax on. And that made me able to not just to walk swiftly, but even to run, because I was, as usual, running late.

I have talked recently about how when the whether people say travel conditions will be hazardous and one should avoid travel, they are not usually thinking about walking. The visibility one needs to safely walk is much lower than the visibility one needs to safely drive, because driving is so much faster. But I read an anecdote on the internet about a runner who had to put their hands in front of their eyes to shield their eyes so that they could see well enough to get home.

We have more snow forecast tonight, but everybody knows it's coming, so the salting and shoveling will be much better.

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Renne Good, media, truth, and the future

2026-01-11T14:47:24Z

I have talked and thought and written quite a lot about the fact that I'm not good at predicting human behavior on a mass scale. I don't understand people who vote differently from me, I don't predict well when the Botanic Garden will be crowded, and I certainly can't easily figure out what will become a viral news moment.

The day that Renee Nicole Good was murdered by ICE in Minneapolis, I was somewhat taken aback that it was big news. As I said that day, is this going to be as big news as Charlie Kirk's assassination? ICE has murdered, and attempted to murder, quite a lot of people, including in Chicago. For some reason, I had assumed that the Chicago woman driving a car who was shot five times by ICE this past fall was a white woman, but it turns out she wasn't. And the race of those who are killed or shot is often a big variable in how viral their deaths become. (White women are mourned and paid attention to much more than all other murdered, missing, or surviving humans.)

Another important variable is the immediate availability of abundant video, and the extreme disconnect between what ICE and the federal government were saying versus what the Minneapolis and Minnesota law enforcement and government officials were saying. NPR and local WBEZ coverage initially parroted ICE's claim that Silverio Villegas Gonzalez, shot and killed in Franklin Park on September 12th, had seriously threatened the life of and injured an ICE officer with his car. In many ways, it was the disconnect between the initial reporting and subsequent reporting on these two incidents in Chicagoland that resulted in such immediate and heavy pushback by the Minneapolis locals, which was a big part of what made this such viral news.

The old cliche that "If it bleeds, it leads," is part of what has led me to avoid watching videos of violence. Just as watching too much local news leads to people believing that their local area is a adrift in violence, watching too many videos of murders makes one viscery believe that they are about to be murdered, too. Our human intuition is not great at statistics: we add up the possibilities we can think of, and the violent events we can remember, to get an idea of the risks. But the per capita violence now is much, much lower than it was in the '70s and '80s. It is cowardly of me, but I do think that it is good choice for me to maintain my hope and friendly good feeling towards other humans to avoid watching videos of violence and murder.

I get the vast majority of my news from WBEZ and NPR: I grew up listening to the radio instead of watching TV news, and I still listen to the radio, even though it's now almost entirely streaming, instead of the terrestrial radio of my youth. So it's really easy for me to avoid watching videos of murder, because I'm not watching most of my news. And the abundance and availability of video doesn't change how I perceive a story: either way, I'm just listening to it, not watching it. I value journalists in part for their willingness to subject themselves to watching the violence, to give me the summary without the trauma of actually watching the video myself.

So while I am somewhat confused about how big the news of Renee Nicole Good's murder has been, I'm not upset that it's big news. This is consistent with how the media works, even though it's not a thing I can effectively predict. It is part of the basic inequality in our society, that the murder of white women gets more media attention. But just as the murder of civil rights activist Viola Liuzzo in 1965 led to significant attention and reform, I'm not sitting here trying to make fewer people talk about Renee Good.

Like Rene Good, I am also a presumably bisexual white woman, and I also have a picture of me by the beach with long hair and up close selfies of me with shaved or otherwise weird hair. I think everyone should experience both long hair and a shaved head in their lifetime: I'm not going to make people shave their head or grow out their hair, but I value having experienced both things, and I realized that not that many people have done so Renee Good did.

But, much more importantly than what Good and I personally share, I am very worried about the loss of a basic shared truth between political divides in the US. I'm also worried that the competing local and federal investigations into the killing of Renee Good, and the governor's possible future use of the Minnesota National Guard, along with the presence of many federal ICE agents could, conceivably, eventually result in civil war. And it's very important to me to promote peace, justice, and freedom, not war. Also, the federal government has paused SNAP funding Minnesota. That's just diabolical.

In a decade, will here be a politics-independent consensus that Renee Good was murdered? Over the next three years, will SNAP recipients in Democratic states consistently get their benefits? Will the United States descend into civil war in my lifetime?

As I said, I'm not good at predicting the mass behavior of humans. I don't know the answer to any of those questions about the future. I don't even know what Republicans overall think right now about whether Renee Good was murdered by that ICE agent. I am very upset about the current state of US democracy, the social safety net, and safety on the streets from the actions of ICE agents.

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Scaredy Cat

2025-10-28T11:04:45Z

This morning, a guest is sleeping on our living room couch. I don't know why: I thought they were going to be in the guest room downstairs. But I decided to feed the cats their wet food in the kitchen, instead of going past the couch with the sleeping person to get to the cat's usual feeding spot by the window in the living room.

Cali was fine with this. Wherever I put the food, she's going to eat it. Jiin was absolutely not okay with it. I ended up having to put Jinn's bowl in the usual spot past the couch, by the window. The whole reason we switched from feeding the cats in the kitchen to feeding the cats in the living room is because Jinn is a scaredy cat, and anytime anyone did anything in the kitchen she freaked out and left her food. It's easier for us humans to avoid the window for the period of wet food consumption than it is to avoid the kitchen.

This morning, after Cali finished as much of her wet food as she wanted, Jinn tried, but was mostly failing, to finish up Cali's food in the kitchen. So I ended up moving Cali's leftover food to the usual spot by window, as well.

Jinn will probably always be a scaredy cat. Jinn is very comfortable with me, sleeps on me, and meows to get in my room, but when I sneeze she usually evacuates my lap. So I can't possibly take it personally, because she is the bravest around me. But the amount of fear she exhibits is pretty extreme.

I know that the stereotype of "scaredy cat" exists for a reason. And I've lived with scaredy cats before. But, somehow, this feels different. We've lived with Jinn for a little over 2 years now, and I feel like I haven't 100% figured her out like I had figured out Artemis, who I lived with for 18 years.

Last week, Dan accused me of hiding in my bedroom from guests. I was offended and I objected, and I realized that a big part of it is that Jinn is hiding in my bedroom from guests, and I am cuddling Jinn and making her feel more comfortable. If Jinn is closed behind a door away from all the people, she does not like it, but if Jinn is closed behind the door with me, she feels very secure and satisfied. She'll still usually evacuate my lap if I sneeze, but she does lay out and look very relaxed.

Because of 18 years of living with Artemis, I thought I was great with scaredy cats. And I'm not bad, but I feel like I need to figure out something systematic to make Jinn more comfortable in the house.

Normally, I object to the idea that our society does too much of adopting stray cats, and therefore we're not taking advantage of artificial selection to make cats good domestic animals. With Jinn, I'm starting to agree. She's just too much of a scaredy cat to be a house cat. Don't get me wrong, she's going to stay in my house, and she's a pretty happy house cat, but her reaction to the food in a different spot this morning was extreme. So I will continue to work on keeping good routines and habits, and cuddling with Jinn when she's hiding. But I think I will also look for more resources on how to comfort scaredy cats.

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Whistle without fear

2025-10-19T22:08:52Z

I am very lucky to feel hardly any fear. One specific moment when I was afraid was watching the pointy teeth of a school of barracuda staring at me as I snorkeled in the Florida keys as a teenager. But this was not fear that made me get out of the water: this was a fear that made me remember the precious and amazing moment for the rest of my life.

I've always lived in fairly safe neighborhoods, my parents instilled in me a confidence in walking around as many neighborhoods as possible, and I'm extremely lucky to have never been attacked, so I don't have fear as a trauma response.

I went to some trainings as a girl scout, including things like the advice to hold your keys between your knuckles in case you are threatened in the parking lot at night, and to always carry a whistle and pepper spray, just in case. But my parents dismissed all of this as counterproductive fear-mongering.

But now, I have a tiny whistle on my key chain. It will always be with me. And I don't have it for fear that someone is going to attack me, I have it for fear that someone in a mask, in a car without license plates, is going to grab someone else on the street in front of me, just because their skin is brown and they are speaking Spanish.

I am proud to have this whistle on me, as a talisman to remind me to act and to record instead of just to watch, to protect those around me from immoral overreach by the government.

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Physical health

2025-10-07T19:30:17Z

I have mostly been sharing good things on social media lately. This is on purpose: I want to make people feel good, to contribute to the resilience of our society against all the doom and gloom and oppression.

But I haven't been doing great.

Part of it is mental health: I haven't been cooking and eating enough good, fresh food, or doing enough fun things. (My fridge is currently stuffed full of vegetables from the farmers market on Sunday, which helps.)

But lately the real issue has been my physical health: for nearly a month I've been dealing with infections. At first, I thought maybe I had a UTI, because my symptoms were exhaustion, sweating, and probably a fever. But my urinary tract was fine, and my nose started dripping a bit, so I chucked it up to a mild upper respiratory infection.

And I got better. But not for long. A week ago Sunday I developed a sore throat, and that sore throat became a desperately sore throat, congestion, exhaustion, an awful cough, persistent sore throat, and a whole lot of mucus.

I've tested myself for covid quite a few times, and been negative each time, and my symptoms don't seem like covid, so I'm pretty sure it's not covid. But I had gotten very used to being healthy, and it's so annoying to be ill.

At the beginning of the pandemic, I was living with quite a covid cautious crew, and we stayed mostly free of infectious diseases for years. Then, when I moved in with Dan 2 and 1/2 years ago, I started getting colds again, which was awful. And then, somehow, I stopped getting sick! It's been 2 years since I had a contagious disease that I'm aware of. That was a very nice two years.

Around nine years ago I got pneumonia, and this is definitely the most ill I have been since then (including the time I may have had covid in March of 2020). Hopefully, I will be at full strength soon and enter another era of long-term health. In the meantime, being ill is awful!

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Possible historical footage in Sinners

2025-08-18T16:17:35Z

I have been rewatching Sinners, showing it to people who haven't managed to see it yet. I love the film, but there is one film-making mystery that I just can't solve, and it's bothering me. Usually, I'm good at googling things, but I can't find any mention of this. I will describe this mystery in a spoiler-free way.

In two scenes, one close to the beginning of the film and one close to the end, there are short snippets of film that feel to me like archival, historic film, colorized and modernized, instead of modern recreation. The costume department did great, there are lots of modern actors looking very 1932 Clarksdale, Mississippi, but something about these two clips just hits different. Part of it might be the focus and panning choices, and some of it is definitely about the humans being depicted.

In the first piece of film that struck me as being marvelously out of place, we are being shown the main street of Clarksdale, which is segregated, with a black side and a white side. There are two black men leaning against a pillar and smoking. It's a very short shot, none of the principal actors are in it, and it just looks different. One guy has a deeply cut side part, which was characteristic of 1930s hairstyles, but not something the hair stylists do that much to the extras and actors in the film. Another big part of it is that the camera moves jerkily and frames poorly: we get the men smoking and a flash of the faces, then their striped shirts and dark suspenders, then their faces again.

The second piece of film is a bunch of work men jumping out of a truck on a job site. Contextually, there are principal actors all around, but this specific shot doesn't include any of them, and none of these particular work men are featured earlier or later in the film. It's shown as a flashback while a main character is making a decision, and again, neither the filmmaking nor the humans feel like the rest of the film. In this case, the shot starts out blurry, focuses, and then pulls back an unsteady way that is not characteristic of most of the filmography of Sinners.

However, in this case, what looks like this truck is blurry in a wide shot of the principal actors (or maybe their stand-ins), and we also see the workmen, occasionally blurry, after they get out of the truck, in front of a hedge that is a core part of the site of principal photography for the outdoor sawmilln shots. I haven't been able to figure out if any of the people in the truck are the same as the modern-day extras walking in front of the modern hedge, but at this moment I think they are different people.

I have two images of a man in a broken hat, one from the presumptive historical footage, one from presumptive modern footage. If this is the same human, there probably isn't any historic footage in Sinners. If these are two different people, there are probably two snippets of historical footage in this film. If it's two different people, the costuming of the modern actor is absolutely perfect.

So are these colorized, edited snippets from actual historical, film, or just Ryan Cougler messing with us? Because Cougler really could really be using historically accurate piss-poor filmography in order to make certain scenes and extras look more authentic.

Back when Wobbegong was teaching middle school history in the early 2000s, he played the first part of Seabiscuit to illustrate the Great Depression to his students. Parts of Sinners feel historically useful the same way (not that any part of this very rated R film could be shown in a middle school), but, like Seabiscuit, most of it very much looks and feels like a modern recreation. But these two short snippets feel like the real thing.

"The real," or authenticity, is a huge theme in Sinners. The Sinners soundtrack features historic recordings, including Pick Poor Robin Clean by Geeshie Wiley, a song used to great effect in the film. And, yes, the historic audio recordings have persistent background noise, hisses and pops, and captured only a small frequency spectrum from reality. Yes, these old recordings are dogshit compared to what it must have been like to listen to this music live. But, for me, listening to and watching the real thing, in addition to the modern recreation, is very valuable.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geeshie_Wiley

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Why I Noped out of a F(Un) Conference

2025-07-20T20:13:26Z

This weekend, I requested off work, and got my tickets in the 15-minute window before they sold out, and went to the Rope F(un)conference.

We got there reasonably early, and I was quickly overwhelmed by the sounds of people talking to each other. People I know, and don't see very often, came up to me to talk to me, and I couldn't participate in the conversation, because I was overwhelmed by the general volume level and crowd. I could hear my friends, for the most part, I just wasn't comfortable talking, or even being, in that space .

Eventually the program got going, and it started with announcements about how we're going to do this conference and all that. And while all 70 odd of us were in one room quietly listening to one person talking at a time, I was okay. But as soon as everyone started talking to each other instead, and then when the conference broke up into the four simultaneous sessions, three of which were in one room, one of which was in its own room, I couldn't handle it .

I attended a first session in the large room with three simultaneous sessions, and there was music going on, and people in the other sessions talking, and I had a very hard time hearing the people in our session talking.

An Un-Conference is one where people don't design the sessions ahead of time, they make up the sessions at the moment, and anyone can present. Wasn't quite sure what rope-related subjects I could present on, but before the conference, I thought I could present a session on how to be a good audience member. Because, when I was a graduate student, I got really good at it: always come up with at least one good question, in case there's awkward silence when the presenter asks if anyone has any questions. Make sure that the questions you ask publicly are ones that are applicable to everyone, and not just you individually, and such like that.

But I didn't end up suggesting that topic, because I quickly realized that I was not going to be comfortable in this space, because it was so loud and simultaneous sessions were going to be so problematic.

Early in the pandemic, as a lot of people were super frustrated with how the time horizon kept getting pushed, forward and forward about when we were going to be able to get back to normal, I realized that I really preferred not having to go to crowded spaces. I have completely stopped going to bars, I try to only go to restaurants at times when they're not going to be busy, specifically have avoided all possible rope conferences and big parties, because they don't think I like being around lots of people at once, anymore.

I have certainly had fun at concerts and conferences and in crowded places in the past. But I've changed a lot over the years and I just don't know how to handle noisy crowded places. I just don't like them.

I'm thinking that maybe if I invest in some of those fancy active noise canceling headphones that are supposed to pick out conversation from the din, maybe I'd be more comfortable. I really do wish I could have continued to attend the unconference this weekend.

I'll continue to host small rope jams at my place and go to classes, and just continue to avoid crowded noisy places. It does make me feel more disabled or out of the norm than I've ever felt before, despite having glasses because of my seriously poor eye sight. I've always thought of myself as neurotypical, but I was being affected by the crowd noise in a way that a lot of neurospicy people say they experience. These types of crowded and noisy places really did not used to bother me like this.

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Book and Anti-Materialism

2025-06-21T19:24:30Z

As I've mentioned before, Little Free Libraries have been getting me back into reading. And I also bought several books on Independent Bookstore Day.

I've been more into non-fiction lately, but fiction tends to grab my attention and provide suspense, and I've been reading much more when I'm reading fiction than I'm reading nonfiction. I'm reading a slim little volume by Rebecca Solnit, "Hope in the Dark," which has been stuck in my dark backpack for about a month and a half now, half read.

But just this week I picked up Assassin's Blade, by Sarah J. Mass. It's a collection of novellas that functions as a prequel to The Throne of Glass. I didn't love it. It's pretty similar to the fantasy fiction I used to read huge volumes of when I was a teenager, but I'm not a teenager anymore. I just don't think that I'm the audience for this.

It's also a little different than most of what I used to read: Assassin's Blade is definitely Romantasy, and I'm much less into Romance than most other genres. If it were more straight fantasy I might like it more, but the thick heaping of "enemies to lovers" and other romance tropes were my least favorite part of Assassin's Blade.

I did read it very quickly, though. And I also had a book I'd already read, ready to put back in the Little Free Library. And the little Free Library is pretty empty right now. So I knew I should go put Assassin's Blade, along with Tooth and Claw, which I have already reviewed, and some puzzles, in the Little Free Library. But I hadn't written a review of Assassin's Blade, and I didn't want to let go of the books.

I grew up primarily reading library books, not buying books, and there weren't Little Free Libraries when I was young, so I've never owned very many books. I generally think of myself as anti-materialistic, but I'm struggling to give up books!

I did write a little about Assassin's Blade, most of which is above, and then I went ahead and put the two novels, and two puzzles, in the little Free Library. So I am working through my book related materialism. But it's so strange to not want to put back in the Little Free Library two books that I got from the Little Free Library! It did feel good to let go of them, though, and hopefully I'll continue to be both anti-materialistic and generous.

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Picard's Trauma

2025-06-15T15:41:39Z

I have always had very modest goals. I've often put on dating apps "My fondest ambition is to never own a car," which really helps appropriately exclude a lot of people from my dating pool.

But, much earlier, in middle school, I got really, really into Star Trek, The Next Generation (TNG). And I very much admired Captain Jean-Luc Picard. In particular, Patrick Stewart was able to play him as very "comfortable in his own skin," and he became one of my main role models.

When Picard came out a few years ago, I watched it. One strong theme of the first season of Picard was aging: Captain Picard had become admiral Picard, but he wasn't at the top of the chain of command, and people didn't really trust him or believe him any more, because they thought he was senile and out of touch. That resonated with me, because aging is going to happen to all of us who last that long.

And then season 2 of Picard came out. Q is back, and Picard has A LOT of unresolved childhood trauma to work through. Also, we've got a dark mirror universe, time travel to 2024, and different characters in different times being played by the same actor: all long standing Star Trek tropes, none of them particularly well executed here. I was definitely not a fan of the idea that Picard has been emotionally stunted all these years by his childhood trauma.

I was not the only one who thought that Picard season 2 was a mess. My friend Drea recut those 9 hours of very messy TV into a two and a half hour movie, which I was privileged to watch on Friday night. However, Drea presevered (and very much improved) the theme that Picard has had largely unresolved childhood trauma this whole time.

Don't get me wrong, Picard got a lot of trauma over the years on TNG; he was Locutus of Borg, he was tortured by the Cardassians. I'd be perfectly happy to watch TV about Picard dealing with that trauma. But not some new, invented drama that should have have relevant all these years.

Picard season 2 uses the excuse that Picard hasn't been in long term relationships (which, in reality, was caused by the episodic nature of TNG and the ineligibility of the captain to date people in his command), even though there was that one episode where he lived a whole lifespan and has a wife and all, and he kept the flute from that episode.

So I really, really did enjoy Drea's recut movie from Picard season 2, but the flaws from the original version were still too big for me.

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A good cry

2025-06-05T12:17:55Z

I don't cry enough any more. When I was a child I cried all the time. I'm not sure exactly when that stopped: it was, I think, a gradual process over the years.

Last week, while I was suspended, upside down, in the air, at a public Rope Jam, a Cure song I hadn't listened to in a long time came on, and I started bawling.

One of the last coherent conversations I had with Charles was after the first time I was in a mermaid tie. It's been a year since he died, and the anniversary, along with the song, and my desperate desire for Charles to be alive, again, when I got rightside up again conspired to give me a very cathartic, excellent crying session.

But, since then, even listening to several songs which have caused me to bawl before, I haven't been able to make the tears flow. I have been able to feel sad, but not to get a good cry.

A lot of it seems to be surprise: the rope jam featured an 80s playlist, but I wasn't expecting that specific song. Maybe each Cure song provides me with one really good cry? If so, I'm very glad The Cure has a very extensive back catalog.

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Muscle Memory

2025-05-24T18:20:32Z

One of my favorite authors, Rebecca Solnit, made a long argument in one of her books that we shouldn't use computer metaphors for human thought, that we should use biological metaphors instead of artificial metaphors. Usually, I agree with Solnit, but not in this case. I think computer metaphors are quite effective for communicating many things about human thought. Is the analogy perfect? No, it is not. No analogy is perfect, and that's fine.

We often think of computers as being very divorced from our squishy, biological selves. But we use computers in very squishy, biological ways. I use muscle memory for entering PIN numbers, for opening specific apps on my phone, lots of specific work tasks on my portable device, and of course, for touch typing. A long time ago I remember sitting in front of my computer, reading a physical book, and my hand reached up and hit the page down button on the keyboard instead of turning the page, because I'd been doing so much reading on the screen at that time. Sports are an obvious example of muscle memory, but so is skipping, and each person's idiosyncratic walking gait, tying knots, chopping vegetables, and so many other things.

It often feels like we live in an entirely different world than the one our pre-electricity ancestors lived in, but we, ourselves, are essentially unchanged.

The physical learning we used to use to collect vegetables, throw spears, tend fires, knit, weave, and do so much else is the very same physical learning we use to type and to open apps. And we continue to do so many tasks that our ancestors did.

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Frida Khalo and the Art Institute of Chicago

2025-05-04T15:44:42Z

I finally saw the Frida Kahlo exhibition at the Art Institute this weekend. It's a bit of a stretch to call it a Frida Khalo exhibition, though. Because, as the title of the exhibition, says it's about Frida Khalo and Mary Reynolds, the latter of which I had never heard of before. Frida stayed with Mary Reynolds and Marcel Duchamp in Paris in 1939 for a little over a month.

The Art Institute of Chicago has exactly and precisely zero holdings of any art by Frida Kahlo at all, which has always felt like a gaping hole in this encyclopedic museum's collection. But the Art Institute has a whole lot of Mary Reynold's work. She was a bookbinder, and the AIC has a lot of her interesting, one off book bindings of surrealist books.

One review of the exhibition said that art museums do too much of the blockbuster type show, and not enough of small, focused, academic exhibitions. And that's certainly what this exhibition is meant to be, but the Art Institute was quite aware that it was going to be a blockbuster, as well. I actually went to the Art Institute for the member opening hours because, otherwise, this exhibition is absolutely jammed. Most of the time, in order to get in, you have to join the virtual queue and then stand in a real life queue.

I suspect people are expecting to see a lot of work by Frida Kahlo, which you can't usually do in Chicago. But this exhibition only has seven of her paintings! There are photographs of her, and two letters written by her, in English, to an American boyfriend of hers, but I don't go to art museums to read letters.

One interesting thing about Khalo is that her work isn't really improved upon by seeing it in person. Normally, I think that reproductions of work are a sorry excuse for seeing it in person. But the super large blown up posters of these works all around the city, and outside the exhibition in the Art Institute, are just as striking, or more striking, than the mostly tiny little portraits in person.

In addition to featuring seven works by Frida Kahlo and quite a lot of books bound by Mary Reynolds, this exhibition features work by Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray and other surrealists.

I'm glad I went to the Art Institute a bit early to see this exhibition, but don't think it's worth a special visit to the AIC to see this exhibition. And it's especially not worth it to wait in the super long line.

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Book Review: Tooth and Claw

2025-04-27T15:36:45Z

Tooth and Claw. Jo Walton. 2003

I picked this book up at a Little Free Library, because it looked like a quick and well-contained read which would be fun and easy, to help my goal of reading more. This wasn't as easy a read as I expected, although it is a delight.

Tooth and Claw is a Victorian novel, specifically modeled after Framely Parsonage, by Anthony Trollope, from 1859. However, it's a Victorian novel in which the characters are all dragons, because, as Joe Walton says in the "Dedication, Thanks, and Notes" of the novel, "It has to be admitted that a number of the core axioms of the Victorian novel are just wrong. People aren't like that. Women, especially, aren't like that. This novel is the result of wondering what a world would be like if they were, if the axioms of the sentimental Victorian novel were inescapable laws of biology."

This novel was written by an author who loves Victorian novels, and written for readers who love Victorian novels. I have never even read a single Victorian novel, and therefore do not know the core axioms of Victorian novels. I do have the habit of reading novels twice in a row, the first time devouring it for suspense and speed, the second time taking it more slowly, looking at nuance, and writing my review. My second time through, the beginning of this novel makes a lot more sense. If you're experienced with Victorian novels, you might be able to really understand it the first time through, but the fact that the main characters are cannibalistic dragons might turn you off a bit. However, this is just making the cannibalistic scheming for inheritance in high society extremely literal.

Tooth and Claw really is wildly inventive, with the dragons wearing hats and sometimes riding trains, and, of course, having a hugely important hierarchical social structure, and extreme biological differences between male and female dragons. Female dragons have hands, and so can easily write, while male dragons have claws, which makes writing harder, but fighting easier.

This is a biting satire of Victorian society and novels, making Victorians actual monsters instead of metaphorical monsters. But it's also a sentimental Victorian novel where circumstances conspire to marry people off ideally. It is (mostly) beautifully well crafted, and I'm very happy I read it. I am not the ideal reader, but I loved it for the creativity and world building, for the literilization of metaphor.

Jo Walton's review of her own book, and description of how she came to write it, is delightful, and, like the novel itself, well worth the read.
https://reactormag.com/dragons-of-the-prime-jo-walton-on-writing-tooth-and-claw//

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Reading, Book Ownership, and bookmarks

2025-04-27T13:56:39Z

I have gone through a lot of cycles with book reading over the years. In grade school, I checked a really extraordinary number of books out from public libraries. The amount of reading assigned for my school work was far below my desired reading volume, starting as soon as I learned to read. I found that I had to control myself, and not finish my textbooks early, because I would forget details of the text by the time we got to them in class.

In middle school, most of my pleasure reading transitioned to science fiction and fantasy novels. Literary fiction and non-fiction were restricted to school assignments, for the most part. In high school, I started to have favorite books I would reread over and over again, but mostly I would just check those books out of the library over and over again, although I did buy books from a few favorite authors. My family did not have a habit of buying books: we had a habit of borrowing books. I had friends who had large personal libraries, and I would often borrow books from them, but I had no intention to own very many books.

When I got to college, the amount, and especially the difficulty, of academic reading started to lead me to reading mostly for school. Reading published research papers, even in biology, can be a slog. I bought the books I was required to buy, both at the school bookstore, and in those early days when Amazon was mostly a way to get required textbooks, used, much more cheaply than from the school bookstore, from Amazon.

After college, I didn't go directly to graduate school: I worked at coffee shops and a grocery store, and I got back into reading for pleasure, in a major way. And for the first time, I started to read fun and enjoyable non-fiction written with skill and even, sometimes, suspense. Almost everything I read at this stage of my life was checked out from the public library.

When I went to graduate school, pleasure reading again almost completely dropped out of my life, for the same reasons as in college. But after I dropped out of graduate school, and moved to Chicago, I started reading voraciously again. Wobbegong was bringing home a lot of really readable history and sociology from his grad program, and I read most of it, too, along with a lot of public library books. I started my LiveJournal, and wrote a really extraordinary number of book reviews.

After Wobbegong left Chicago, I continued to read quite a lot. I had a long train commute to work, and I continued to check a lot of books out of the library. While waiting for a bus to take me to the Botanic Garden, I discovered Amaranth Books, an extraordinary little used bookstore in Evanston, which is curated and organized in an idiosyncratic way. I felt like it had a shelf of non-fiction books just for me. I started buying books occasionally. A very good friend of mine gifted me a Kindle, and I started occasionally buying books for Kindle, too.

But then, I started biking almost everywhere, and, very slowly, I mostly stopped reading books. Unlike my previous reading droughts, which were because of the extensive reading I was doing for college, I just started reading less. Having a highly distracting smart phone with me all of the time also greatly reduced my reading time: I got into the habit of looking at my smart phone, instead of reading a book, at lunch at work.

Over the past seven years or so, most of the reading I have been doing is rereading beloved books, that I own physically, or have on my Kindle.

And then I started picking up books from little free libraries. They have a bit in common with public libraries, although of course the selection is much, much, smaller, and if you see something you want, right now is the time to grab it, because you don't know if you'll ever see it again. And there's no borrowing time limit on the books. Little free libraries are the exact opposite of the curated Amaranth Books in Evanston.

I have felt a little guilty about not returning my little Free Library books fast enough, and never adding new books to the Little Free Library collective collection. I was also tempted by some books I saw at work, so I bought them, with the goal of reading them, reviewing them, and then donating them to a Little Free library.

Yesterday was Independent Bookstore Day, and I decided to visited three different independent bookstores. I bought books from all three bookstores, and all three put a branded bookmark in my new book. Despite the extraordinary amount of money I was spending at them, the college bookstores of my past did not give out free bookmarks.

Over the years I have mostly used scraps of paper and old receipts (including public library receipts) as bookmarks. I bought a metal bookmark at the Art Institute last year, but it is too large and heavy, and falls out of books when they are loose in my backpack.

I was reading a Little Free Library book yesterday, on the train, with a scrap of cardboard that had once been a tag on a jacket as a bookmark. And after I left my first bookstore, with a new book and a new bookmark, I started using the new bookmark in my book, because it it works better as a bookmark.

I spent way too much money on books yesterday, and I don't want to start buying a whole lot of anything, even books. But I think I've switched to using actual bookmarks, instead of receipts and other scraps.

I really do want to keep reading and reviewing books. Whether I get books at public libraries, little free libraries, used bookstores, new book stores, or read digital versions, I am rededicating myself to reading. Reading, and writing, really make me feel so much better. This last reading drought was too long and too deep.

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Film Review: Sinners

2025-04-26T12:44:42Z

Sinners, 2025 Directed by Ryan Coogler

I absolutely adored this film. Sinners is absolutely excellent. You should go see it, and you should avoid as many spoilers as possible before you go see it. This is a spoiler-free review.

Is it perfect? No, it is not. At one point, Smoke, one of two characters played by Michael B. Jordan, pulls the pin of a grenade with his teeth. That sort of small error, questionable directorial choice, or distracting issue happened quite a few times: this is the third quibble I've written, trying to find one that I know is wrong, not just wrong for me, and isn't too spoilery.

But I want to talk not about my quibbles, but about what I loved about this film, which was a lot of things. It is a stuffed, maybe even overstuffed, film, but in a rich, sumptuous, beautiful way.

After a voiceover introduction with beautiful textile illustrations, in the opening scene Sammie, aka Preacher Boy, staggers into his father's church on Sunday morning, the absolute picture of deeply traumatized horror film survivor. And that church! It is a small white painted wooden building with a large door as the main entrance, and a small door on the opposite side open to perfectly frame the preacher against the beautiful day. The choir of children up front and the worshipers are wearing white, in striking contrast with their deep black skin. There are black crosses hanging up on the white walls of the church. Only the preacher wears black, silhouetted against the bright sky behind him. Think stereotypical black sharecopper church. This film is not subtle. It starts with the most stereotypical, symbolic, emblematic, iconic images and ideas, and works from there.

Then the we go back one day in time. Sammie is picking cotton with other sharecroppers, early in the morning, but he skips out quickly, because he's finished his quota and he's got things to do. He greets his mama, gets lectured by his father in the church, and then gets picked up, in a car, by the Smoke Stack twins, both played by Michael B. Jordon.

There are probably 20 minutes of shots of cotton fields in this film. There are dirt roads, a chain gang, a segregated Main Street in town, extreme poverty among sharecroppers, beautiful live oaks, a train station, every icon of the Delta.

Personally, I adore beautiful films, and this is a beautiful film. Go see it on the best screen you can. I regret not having chosen the IMAX option, and I'm seriously considering going to see it again, this time in IMAX. I am a new fan girl of the cinematographer, Autumn Durald Arkapaw. But, essentially, this is a film about music. It's a film about everything, but especially about Delta blues music. So the sound matters. The score, by Ludwig Göransson, is breathtaking, and this movie may made me want to listen to a lot of blues.

Generally speaking, I am neither a huge music fan, nor a huge horror film fan. But I am into music: it's just that I'm not as much into music as my late ex-spouse was, nor many other people around me. I do like listening to the same albums and songs over and over again, and this movie is obsessed with music. So it felt strange to be taking a group of four people to see horror film about music, but it felt very good .

As I wrote in my last post, Wobbegong was the one who told me to see films for most of my adult life, including films that I saw with other people. I've been the one dragging people to see films, because Woobegong told me to. I don't have Wobbegong to tell me to see films anymore. But I do still have the Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, and my other friends, and I am so glad I dragged three other people to a theater last night.

I also don't think of myself as a fan of horror, but I realized last night that three of my favorite films (not my three very favorite films, but definitely three of my top 15 films of all time) are The Babadook, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, and now, Sinners. All horror films. I was somewhat distressed by the abundance of horror film trailers at the beginning of Sinners: they were trailers showing too much, both too much of the plots of the movies they were advertising, and too much gore for me. I can handle quite a lot of gore, but it is not my favorite thing in films. Horror can be a fantastic way of saying important and interesting things, and Sinners uses horror to say important and interesting things.

So go see it, friends, and let's talk about it afterwards!

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Kindness, New College, and the Pope

2025-04-22T20:45:28Z

Being kind to others is radically important to me. It makes my life better, and I am quite certain that, the more everyone is kind to each other, the better our world will be. That doesn't mean I'm in favor of letting people walk all over me, or of not pushing back against deeply evil policies and actions. And I try not to police other people's anger and activist choices.

I'm a member of a FaceBook group of almost 3K alums from New College of Florida (which is a lot, because New College has never had more than 700 students at a time, and often had closer to 400). Since the conservative activist takeover of the governing board, the presidency, and, as far as they can manage it, the curriculum*, this Facebook group has been considerably more active, and there's a lot of anger and angst. Very reasonably. I'm angry, too.

But recently, someone posted news of a coach leaving, and most people, including the original poster of the news, were mean about it. One friend of mine pushed back on this unkindness, and was absolutely overwhelmed by an avalanche of meanness directly at him.

A little bit of background: while, I was there, New College had sports only for fun: no organized intercollegiate sports of any kind. A friend of mine taught some swimming lessons, a fencer moved into the neighborhood and tried to teach some fencing classes, we had a long term Aikido club, a bunch of people played ultimate, there was a lot of capoeira, and we had an active sail club, complete with boats.

When governor DeSantis replaced the entire governing board with conservative activists, they hired a politician and conservative flunky, Richard Corcoran, to be the president of New College. Corcoran went about trying to bring in conservative students by creating sports programs. He hired a bunch of Christian coaches, and enrolled a lot of athletes, without telling them that New College didn't have any sports fields, or a sports medicine concentration, or any academics who knew anything about sports at all.

By the time I was a student, New College's official mascot was the empty set. The history behind that was that people had written [ ] where the macrost was supposed to be, because they hadn't come up with one yet. But, over the years, the students decided they liked having the empty set as a mascot. I certainly thought it was charming. Corcoran was not a fan of the empty set as an actual mascot for actual sports teams, so New College is now the Mighty Banyans. Or is it the Fighting Banyans?

Anyway, there was a news article about one of the New College sports coaches getting a job at a Christian high school as the athletic director. An alum posted the article with the words "And the rats begin leaving...."

I thought that was insensitive and rude, but it wasn't hugely important to me. However, a fellow alum, who I went to New College with, was fairly upset by the rudeness, and replied. There was quite a lot of discussion, and the vast majority of it was people being mean to my friend for somehow being a Christian who always thinks he's being persecuted, and other really wild speculation. My friend was just asking people to be nice, and to use evidence of wrongdoing before saying that people are doing wrong. All of that has now been deleted, which is fine, actually, because for the most part people weren't addressing real issues, they were just being mean.

Also this week, Pope Francis died. I do not care very much about Christianity in general or Catholicism in particular, but of course there's been a lot of reporting on Pope Francis's life and papacy. Multiple commentators seem to agree that Francis was all about meeting the human in front of you as they are. He came from a pastoral instead of clerical perspective: he wasn't an academic or a leader, first, he was a pastor helping humans, with compassion and kindness.

All that stuff a couple of years ago about giving gay Catholics private blessings inside your office, while continuing to disallow official gay blessings or ceremonies was very consistent with Francis's perspective. He wasn't making large changes to the church's policy or position, but he thought the most important thing in Catholicism was treating every human as divinely created.

When the subject of forgiveness comes up, my position is always that you don't have to forgive anyone for anything they did to you, but all humans, even the most evil, deserve to be treated kindly when at all possible. I saw a video from a hospice nurse, who was working with dying people on compassionate release from prison. The people to whom they did bad things do not have to forgive them, but having a compassionate nurse there at the end of their life is important and good.

So, yes, I think kindness is extremely important. I will try not to police your anger or your activism or your opinions, but I do think that the way to a better future is radical care for each other.

*New College didn't even have a curriculum when I went there: it was very important to a lot of fellow students that they didn't have to waste any time with meaningless, irrelevant core curriculum classes. In order to get a degree you had to convince professors in your field that you'd taken the right classes, and were sufficiently well-rounded. Different concentrations did have prerequisites and core requirements, but nobody had to take a language to get a math degree, for example. When I was there, the central academic idea and motto was something along the lines of "In the final analysis, the student is responsible for their own education".

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Movies and Wobbegong

2025-04-19T13:52:18Z

I listen to Pop Culture Happy Hour, an NPR podcast, mostly as a substitute for actually listening to new music and watching a bunch of shows and a bunch of movies. But, in 2022, they were raving about Everything Everywhere All at Once, and I was tempted to go see it. It was from The Daniels, directors known for their absurdity, and I, historically, haven't particularly liked absurd things. So I talked to Wobbegong about it, and he really encouraged me to go see it. He thought the Daniels were excellent directors, and it sounded like a good movie, even though, for pandemic reasons, he hadn't seen it yet.

So, I put on my N95, went to a crowded theater, and had an absolutely wonderful movie watching experience.

Wobbegong certainly didn't always make good movie suggestions: he showed me a bunch of movies I absolutely hated over the years. But he was still an enormously influential part of my movie watching experience, and he suggested I watch most of my favorite films.

Last year, Wobbegong strongly recommended that I go see Civil War, directed by Alex Garland. It seemed like a very important film to him. I didn't exactly enjoy the film, because that's not the type of film it is, but it felt important and impactful, even if it did take a few cliches a little too literally. I'm very grateful I saw it, and that Wobbegong convinced me to go see it.

I don't know how Wobbegong would have felt about Warfare, Alex Garland's new movie, which is out now. And I don't think I'm going to go see it: I haven't seen a film in theaters since Civil War last year.

I'm wondering whether I should go see Sinners, the new movie by Ryan Coogler. Pop Culture Happy Hour was absolutely cheerleading it, like they did Everything Everywhere All at Once. Sinners is a horror movie, which isn't always my favorite genre, but I did love The Babadook, a 2014 horror film that Wobbegong strongly recommended.

The last time Pop Culture Happy Hour made me really really want to watch a film, it was I Saw the TV Glow, which came out on May 3rd of 2024 (less than a month after Civil War, which premiered on April 12th of 2024). I still haven't seen Glow, because, despite the short amount of time between Civil War coming out and Glow coming out, by the time I heard about Glow, Wobbegong wasn't healthy and together enough to go see movies in theaters, or even to talk about movies. And then, both the fact that I wasn't able to talk to Wobbegong about it, and the fact that glow is a trans narrative (and I always thought that Wobbegong was an egg), means that I still haven't seen I Saw the TV Glow.

Sinners doesn't have all of that baggage; it's no different from everything else I will experience for the rest of my life: I won't be able to talk to Wobbegong about it.

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My feelings about US Politics in 2025

2025-04-04T19:15:14Z

I just read a fantastic, cogent description of where American politics and government are right now. When you see the current situation, and how we got here, all written out in one place, the terrible situation we're in is really quite stunning.

This friend of mine is a Wisconsin friend, which means her vote counts. I live in Illinois, which means my vote doesn't count. After voting in Florida in the 2000 election, when the New College Nader vote was, briefly, higher than the total margin between Bush and Gore, I've been really aware of the importance of voting. And upset that my presidential vote doesn't count, because of the electoral college.

I'm super happy that I ended up in Chicago. I love this city, for so many reasons. But Milwaukee is a very nice place, too, and it has more snow than Chicago. As a fairly new friend said to me the other day, "Oh, you're the winter outdoorsy type". And, yes, yes, I am, and yes, Wisconsin is better for winter outdoorsy stuff than Illinois is. Milwaukee has fairly good public transit, an excellent art museum, the same lake, and its skies are less polluted by artificial light. I really, really could enjoy living there.

But I've made my life here in Chicago. I don't want to leave. Moving to Milwaukee was, really, actually, a thing I was thinking about doing this summer, for electoral college reasons. I once had a boyfriend in Milwaukee, a Chicago friend of mine once had a job in Milwaukee, another Chicago friend came to my board game party last weekend after canvassing in Wisconsin.

I really don't live far from Milwaukee. Except that we've got very poor transit between cities. You have to drive, take a bus, or be very lucky with Amtrak. We could have high speed rail between these cities, but we don't. I met my above-mentioned Wisconsin friend at a party in Chicago, less than a mile from the Howard L stop, where a train from Milwaukee used to stop, 100 years ago. It doesn't, any more.

It's so hard to figure out what to do to make this country better, how to help. And it's so hard to do anything other than laundry, barely, with the world (figuratively) exploding around us.

This is why Charles said last year that the only thing he was happy about, as he was dying of cancer at the age of 51, was that he didn't have to watch the end of American democracy.

Of course, instead of me moving to Wisconsin (or the more likely outcome of just feeling guilty for living in Illinois) we could, as a nation, figure out electoral college reform. That would help our democracy, I think.

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Memories, Pictures, and Writing

2025-03-29T20:07:11Z

For about 24 hours, I forgot my phone PIN, resulting in me being locked out of my phone for about 30 hours (as a security feature, when you keep entering incorrect PINs, the phone starts locking you out from attempting for longer and longer periods of time, and my phone imposed a 12 hour lockout between my penultimate attempt and my successful attempt). This forgetting has me worried about possible cognitive decline, although a more important cause is probably better lotion application to my hands, resulting in fewer times I have to use (and therefore renew my memory of) my PIN. In addition to thinking about my memory, this 30 hour phone lockout has me thinking of muscle memory, pictures, and writing.

I mostly use muscle memory for PINs, and this causes trouble fairly often. Just this week, my workplace changed the PIN on the employee area doors, and I’m obviously entering the old one, and having to then enter the new one. (Having to think explicitly about the work door PIN is probably part of what shoved my own personal phone PIN out of my brain.) Last fall, I completely forgot my debit card PIN for about a week. And, then, suddenly, it came back to me.

Muscle memory is an older thing in humans than remembering numbers, and I’ve always been personally pretty terrible at memorization, especially memorizing numbers. I’m quite good at muscle memory, but numbers on a screen or a num pad are not a great application of muscle memory, especially because, for me, I do eventually forget the actual numbers, and then I fail to enter the correct number.

While I was locked out of my phone, I couldn’t take pictures. I normally take a lot of pictures. My picture taking habit is causing problems (I’ve nearly filled my paid google account storage, and don’t really want to pay more), but I think of humans as being inherently very visual, and I think that the ease of taking and sharing pictures is a kind of a return to more evolutionarily relevant way of sharing reality with others. In fact, I bought my mom and my sister their first smart phones in large part because I wanted them to take and send me pictures. The letter writing of the 1700s seems less natural for humans than the picture and video sharing of the modern era.

That said, while I value my pictures of snow and crocuses from a decade ago, I value my own writing, in particular the writing on my old LJ account, much more. I don’t have all of that saved anywhere, and it would take much less memory to save everything I’ve ever written than a week worth of pictures. Way back in middle school, I realized that writing is a very important part of thinking, for me. In the gap of time between LJ and this account, I didn’t do very much writing, and I also didn’t do very much reading. I read Thomas Princen’s The Logic of Sufficiency at least twice, but I didn’t ever get around to reviewing it, so I don’t actually know what I think about it. Right now I’m reading it yet again, and hopefully I’ll actually review it soon.

Muscle memory and images are very human things, but writing is something that I value even more. And, even if writing doesn’t end up pushing back the usual mental decline that eventually comes with aging, it will give me a lot of valuable ideas and opinions.

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