Digital Manticore

Two Weeks in the Life: April 27, 2025

Posted on April 27, 2025 by Lindsey / 0 Comment

Hello, friends and enemies. Before I get into my big political feelings this week, here’s a picture of my new bed. Keen readers may note it looks exactly like my old bed; that is correct. We got the same bed frame in a larger size and we had already been using a king comforter to end the Blanket Wars. It is much nicer having a little extra room to sprawl. I also really like the Big Fig Mattress. We got the “firm” one, which is actually a little squisher than our old mattress. Kirk claims he would like a harder bed but he also admitted he’s sleeping well on it. This is a man who happily naps on the floor though so we can’t really trust his opinion on whether a bed is comfortable, can we?

new king-size bed with Fritz in the corner looking at something out the window — bed update

Current Events

Okay, this stuff sucks but if I don’t talk about it, my brain will explode.

For the last fucking time: Vaccines do not cause autism

On April 16, Robert F Kennedy Jr, head of the Department of Health and Human Services, stood up in public in front of a microphone and said some of the shittiest things possible about autism. He said that autism is a “disease” and an “epidemic.” He is mad that we all know about autism now and so many people are autistic, unlike when he was a lad and presumably no one was autistic. Here’s the quotation that stuck out to me and that’s been making the rounds on the internet:

These are kids who will never pay taxes, they’ll never hold a job, they’ll never play baseball, they’ll never write a poem, they’ll never go out on a date. Many of them will never use a toilet unassisted. And we have to recognize we are doing this to our children. And we need to put an end to it.
April 16, 2025 Health and Human Services Secretary Kennedy News Conference on Autism Rates

My first reaction was “oh, cool, do I not have to pay taxes now?” I know that’s not what’s going on here of course but I’m contractually obligated to joke about these things for mental health reasons. These comments have led to a flood of discourse by autistic people and our loved ones in the theme of “I play baseball! I write poems! I can use the toilet!” Okay, congrats. That is not the point. If you can do all that, this isn’t about you. This is about dehumanizing a group of people with greater needs and making it clear that the government thinks some people do not deserve to live.

But let’s go back a little bit. These remarks were delivered in the context of RFK’s new research focus for the HHS. He thinks we need to find the “toxins” and “environmental exposures” that are causing autism and he has announced that we are going to know the cause of autism by September. The AP reports that “Kennedy has hired David Geier, a man who has repeatedly claimed a link between vaccines and autism, to lead the autism research effort.” This is not a good-faith effort to figure out what causes autism. If it were, we wouldn’t have an end-date a just a few months away and the guy in charge wouldn’t be a known “vaccines cause autism” guy. That’s because this “research” doesn’t actually matter for what is happening now. It doesn’t matter what they “find,” the results are gonna be the same.

For the record, vaccines do not and never have caused autism. There’s a whole-ass Wikipedia article about the original fraudulent paper by Andrew Wakefield, published in 1998, that started this whole lie. Wakefield is no longer a licensed doctor because of that paper. The Lancet, the journal that published Wakefield’s work, redacted it. There is literally zero evidence that vaccines are linked to autism. Autism is a developmental disorder, which means that autistic kids reach developmental milestones slower than neurotypical peers. The reason people don’t notice autism when their children are little infants is because all they know how to do is shit and scream and that’s considered developmentally appropriate. It takes a little while for their brains and bodies to cook so most parents won’t notice anything amiss until kids are around two or three years old—coincidentally the same age that kids start getting vaccinated.

We do, however, know that genetics are a major factor in whether you get autism or not. That’s why so many parents of autistic kids are getting diagnosed now. The doctor evaluates the kid then looks at the parents and says “you know, you may want to consider …” et voila. I also think a lot of kids from my generation did not get diagnosed earlier because most parents of autistic kids are some flavor of neurodiverse themselves and, when their kid does weird autistic shit, they say “well, everyone is like that.” Spoiler: not everyone is like that. Everyone here is like that because the family is autistic. More people are getting diagnosed because they are comparing notes on the internet in a way that wasn’t possible until recently. Diagnostic criteria have also been updated such that more people can be diagnosed. The 2013 version of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) had updated guidelines that said practitioners could diagnose someone with both ADHD and autism (colloquially known as “AuDHD”). This led to way more autism diagnoses because ADHD and autism appear together so frequently.

a picture of the planet Pluto with the text "'There was no autism diagnosed before 1930.' Pluto wasn't discovered until 1930, Pluto causes autism" — have we considered …?

Reminder: Not being disabled is temporary

The rhetoric is currently focused on autism and ADHD, but that could change. Two things to keep in mind about disability are:

Anyone can become disabled at any time
“Disability” is a social construct (My thoughts on this subject were significantly informed by Imani Barbarin aka crutches_and_spice on Instagram).

You might get arthritis as you age. You might get in a car accident and get a traumatic brain injury. You could go blind. You could lose a hand in an industrial accident. You might develop type 2 diabetes. You might have a major depressive episode. You might, as six to seven percent of adults do, develop long COVID. These are all disabilities. Hell, being near-sighted is a disability but, as a culture, we’ve decided that wearing glasses is fine and a little myopia among friends is nothing to fret over. Anyone can be born disabled or become disabled (or have disability thrust upon them). This is why the response to “Autistic people will never play baseball” isn’t “I’m a professional baseball player.” The response needs to be that people are worthy of living with dignity and as much independence as possible even if they are disabled. Being disabled isn’t a reason to throw someone away. Yes, right now they’re only focusing on autism, but it’s naive to think this won’t progress to any other disability.

What is considered a disability can change. The American Psychiatric Association classified “homosexuality” as a mental disorder until 1973. Being gay wasn’t just a way of being: it was a disease. In the 1940s and 50s, “roughly 60,000 lobotomies were performed in the United States and Europe” with the goal of “reduc[ing] agitation, anxiety, and excess emotion.” Oh, and the vast majority of lobotomies were performed on women (including on RFK Jr.’s aunt Rosemary, just for one example). Being too emotional was a disability worthy of getting your frontal lobe severed.

This is why it should worry you that republicans are pushing concepts like “Trump derangement syndrome,” pathologizing resistance to dear leader.

the top half of a white cat's face, it's eyes narrowed. Small text above its head reads "wack." — so fucking wack

Our society has spent the last five years normalizing mass death, as Sarah Kendzior has often put it, thanks to the covid pandemic. There are still thousands of people dying from covid every month yet our government declared the “public health emergency” was over (which, I know from my job, just meant they weren’t going to support anyone or pay for anything. It was never a declaration that the covid pandemic was over). We’re just supposed to be fine with this. Remember when the Texas lieutenant governor said in 2020 that we would just need to let some old people die as a sacrifice to the economy? Everyone freaked out over this at the time but that’s basically what we ended up doing. So many people are acting like the pandemic is over or vaccines and masking is unnecessary. Yes, the risk is lower than it was but you know what brings the risk down even more? Getting your damn vaccine. Wearing a fucking mask in public. So, we shouldn’t be surprised when this government eventually comes out and says that we need to start letting disabled people die for the economy. We’ve been doing it for years now.

Straight-up Nazi shit

All this shit is eugenics. It was always eugenics and Trump has always been a eugenicist president. It’s not a secret. One of Trump’s early acts as a candidate in 2015 was to mock a disabled reporter. Trump’s speeches have often echoed Hitler and he reportedly keeps a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bed. He said there were “very fine people on both sides” in reference to the white nationalist march in Charlottesville in 2017. He’s a white supremacist who brings people with the same ideology into his government. Given this, it’s not surprising that RFK Jr. is out here talking about autistic people being a drain on the economy in a way that evokes Nazi Germany’s concept of “useless eaters.”

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, this administration seems to be establishing a framework that positions autistic and ADHD people as enemies of America or, at best, freeloaders. There was the February 13 Executive Order Establishing the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission, which explicitly named autism as a “dire threat to the American way of life.” Now, I am only an amateur historian, but I don’t think you need a Ph.D. to see what is about to happen. As usual, I would like to preface this with I desperately hope I am wrong. Alternately, I hope things change and this becomes irrelevant. However, with things as they are, I think this is a very possible path. These are my predictions:

RFK will announce in September that vaccines cause autism. The US will stop funding and researching vaccines. More people will be sick and die from preventable disease and more people will become disabled.
Being autistic will now be “our fault” for being vaccinated. The US will stop providing any kind of disability support. They’re already working on this with ending support for Section 504, which grants disabled people equal access to education.
With all support removed, more autistic people will struggle to be “productive” members of society. The unemployment rate among autistic people is already very high (around 40% per this study from 2017, but there are many studies with varying results). Remember that disabled people who don’t work can get Social Security disability benefits, but DOGE is working hard to dismantle the Social Security Administration. It will be harder to get what little money Social Security provides to disabled people.
The goverment will start rounding up disabled people and letting us die or sending us to work camps. RFK Jr. previously said he wants to send people to camps. I’m not just pulling that idea from the air. He literally already wants to do that.

This may sound far-fetched to some, but I find it all too plausible. The government already said that autistic people are a drain on society. RFK Jr. has already announced that he will be building a registry of autistic people. CBS news reports that “The National Institutes of Health is amassing private medical records from a number of federal and commercial databases to give to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new effort to study autism,” and “a new disease registry is being launched to track Americans with autism, which will be integrated into the data.” They also want to use data from “smart watches and fitness trackers.” Wow, what could possibly go wrong? (So, so much.)

This is just one piece of the assault on our freedoms that we’re experiencing under Trump round two. And you know what makes me insane? They fucking told us they would do this. The extreme right-wing nutjobs got together and wrote 900 pages of fanfiction about America and all the terrible things they want to do and now they are making it canon. They are taking advantage of normalized mass death, the many surveillance technologies, and our disregard for other people and weaponizing it to further divide us. The antidote to fascism is radically caring about other people. It is both that simple and that difficult. We all have to grow the fuck up and start giving a shit about others even if they are kind of annoying. “Autistic people will never write a poem.” So fucking what? I bet RFK Jr. hasn’t ever written a poem and can’t even tell you what scansion is but that doesn’t mean he should be left for dead while a worm eats his brain. Lots of people will never write a poem but that may be down to our education system more than anything. The point is this: everyone who is alive is worthy of life. The second you start deciding that some people don’t deserve it, you’re being a fascist. That’s it. That’s been this country’s problem for a long time but it came into stark relief thanks to covid and it’s only getting worse now. We are too quick to say “it’s fine if some people just die.” No, it’s not. That’s not how you get to be a civilization. If society can’t take care of the people least able to care for themselves, then it’s not a society at all.

Books and Other Words

book: Oranges are Not the Only Fruit — Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

I picked up Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson from the Lavender Library. This autobiographical novel focuses on Jeanette’s extremely religious upbringing in 1960s England. Jeanette grows up going to church, spreading the word of the Lord everywhere she goes, and planning to be a missionary when she grows up. When she finally starts going to public school, the teachers and the other kids are put off by her off-the-charts religious zeal. Her life gets upended when Jeanette starts realizing she’s attracted to girls and she gets shunned by her mother and entire church community. One of the book’s ironies, however, is that nearly all the characters in the book are women. Women are the practically the only people in her life aside from the church pastor and her father (who doesn’t figure into the story at all). Yet, when Jeanette is attracted to women, suddenly women’s company is a problem. I related a fair bit to this book although my upbringing wasn’t nearly as severe as Winterson’s. I remember being weird and religious at school too, like the time my sixth grade teacher asked us to imagine a utopia and I invoked the “law of consecration” (that’s an archive.org link so you don’t have to give internet traffic to the Mormons church), which is basically religious socialism (no need to wonder why I’m a leftist lol). My teacher left a note on my work like “???” I had no idea it was a term specific to church. Mormonism also taught (and presumably still teaches) that it’s “okay” to be attracted to people of the same sex as long as you don’t act on it. Which … it’s not really okay then? Not surprising that it took me until my 20s to realize that I was bi, is it?

book cover for Space Opera featuring a disco ball with rings like a planet. Greyscale on kobo ereader — Space Opera

I re-read Space Opera by Catherynne Valente to refresh myself before reading the sequel, Space Oddity, which was published last fall. The book is very much in the spirit of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in that it’s a madcap tale of humanity’s first encounter with the wide and widely populated in universe. In Space Opera, the galaxy’s various other inhabitants hold a Eurovision-like contest to decide if the species they encounter are sentient. Aging pop star Decibel Jones and what remains of his band, The Absolute Zeroes, get dragged into the song contest to try to prove that humans are, well, human. It’s funny and wacky and emotional and there are lots of very weird alien species. This book came out in 2018 and is what got me interested in Eurovision in the first place (Valente explicitly describes this book as “space Eurovision”), although it was a few years before I actually watched the whole thing live. I also really appreciate the book’s message that the antidote to things being fascist and shitty isn’t to be bummed out but to be as glam and fabulous as possible in the face of it. It’s a highly encouraging perspective and one I am continuously striving to embrace.

book cover for A Conspiracy of Truths in greyscale on kobo ereader — A Conspiracy of Truths

I really loved the Alexandra Rowland books I read last year (notably Running Close to the Wind) so I started working my way through her back catalog with A Conspiracy of Truths. It’s not nearly as wacky as her more recent stuff but it is still a very good story. It follows a nameless man and part of the wandering order of storytellers, called Chants, who gets arrested on suspicion of being a witch, and stays arrested on suspicion of being a spy. The story follows Chant as he literally tries to talk his way out of jail and basically orchestrates a coup in the process. I enjoyed this book enough that I’ve checked out the sequel from the library. I will report back!

Meanwhile, on the internet:

“What the shroom-ghost of J.C. says here in Revelations is exactly the problem with Democrats” via Deez Links. From the article, “I hate Republicans because they’re my political enemies, and in a democracy, politics is the way we make decisions that we would otherwise make by killing each other … Republicans want the world to be worse, whereas Democrats merely don’t want it to be better.”
At Home with the Bean King via Alta. I enjoyed this profile of Steve Sando, the founder of Rancho Gordo, which is where I buy most of my beans!
Just your non-religious blessings for making it through the week via @longlivenewro on instagram. This is my favorite thing right now. The Pink Eminence is blessing us for surviving the week.

Corporeal Form

My dentist recently informed me that I need braces to which I immediately replied “I already had braces.” Alas, it’s possible to need braces again. Such things should be illegal.

a gif of flaming text reading "more fucking body problems"

Apparently the position of my tongue leaves it constantly pushing on my front teeth and it’s shoving the teeth outward, so now my bite is all fucked up. The dentist said that, if I get braces, I’ll have to wear a retainer forever afterwards or I’ll be back to the same issue. So, I was like, okay fine let’s get this over with and I have an appointment this week to have them installed. The braces in and of themselves are annoying but I’m overly upset about it. It’s more like, god, another thing to deal with. We’re living through fascism and now I have to get braces. Give me a break.

Languages and Wikipedia

I’m still working away at my translations and other Wikipedia editing. I passed 2,000 edits on English Wiki this week! Most of my edits are small, but still, I think it’s cool. I’m making progress on translating all the articles about Skagafjörður, Iceland into English. In my list of something like 160 articles, I’ve got around 40 left. Some recent selections include: Hraun in Fljót, Skeiðsfoss power station, and Djúpudalir. In Spanish, I’m currently on a James Thurber kick. He’s best known as the author of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty—Spanish Wikipedia had articles for both movie adaptations but not the original story. So I translated that and then continued on to the articles about The Unicorn in the Garden and The Catbird Seat. Up next is A Thurber Carnival, which is a stage production. Until I came across this article, I had completely forgotten that I actually did a few scenes from it in high school. My drama III class used it for our end-of-semester showcase. Funny how life is full of details that you can forget about until something prompts you to remember.

Kitchen Witchery

I tried a new dinner recipe, remixed an existing recipe, and made a new dessert over the last two weeks. I liked this skillet vegetable pot pie, featuring green peans and potatoes. I added flagolet beans to it, which kind of made it a green bean pie since that’s where flagolet beans come from. That’s okay though. It was good but I either needed to cut the potatoes smaller or cook the pie longer becase they were a little crunchy, which is not what anyone wants from potato. I also skipped the egg wash because I am not using a whole egg on aesthetics in this economy! I used the rest of the flagolet beans in a version of this butter beans with pecorino and pancetta recipe. I mixed in some tortellini to round out the dish and I thought it was really good! Finally, I made this delicious chocolate cake with brown butter frosting. The frosting was so dang good. It was definitely worth the extra effort.

a bowl of soupy pot pie with potato, beans, and green beans topped with puff pastry — skilled vegetable pot pie

a plate with a big pile of tortellini mixed with beans and pancetta, plus broccoli and a slice of bread — skilled vegetable pot pie

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Just look at this fucking guy.

Fritz the cat laying on his side tucked under a sheet. His head and shoulders are sticking out at the top and the tip of his tail at the bottom — absolute baby

Fritz the cat lying on a dining chair in the path of the sun — absolute baby

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: April 13, 2025

Posted on April 13, 2025 by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. I have recently been beset by the urge to mindlessly click on things. Last week I “beat” the watermelon game, which has been my go-to activity when I want to just click at something for a while, that is, I made two watermelons. I was deeply disappointed that they did not merge and there were no fireworks or anything to mark this accomplishment. The game acted like this wasn’t even an achievement. What a disappointment. I had to find a new thing to click on for when I want to do nothing (perhaps others would feed this urge by scrolling TikTok or something, but I must click and videos are not relaxing), so I’ve started playing minesweeper. I used to play minesweeper a lot as a kid. Of course, back then it came for free with the computer (Microsoft has taken everything from us!). We weren’t allowed to watch TV during the week or during the daytime in the summer, so I would spend a lot of time playing Windows computer games and listening to the radio. There’s something satisfying about just clicking on shit. I don’t know. Maybe it’s a form of autistic stimming. Anyway, I’m keeping myself entertained and away from the infinite scroll.

Screenshot of the watermelon game showing two watermelons stacked on top of each other surrounded by a few other, smaller fruits — The watermelon game mocks my successes

a completed game of minesweeper on expert mode — The watermelon game mocks my successes

Current Events

As much as I appreciate being right about things, I would prefer to not have been right about this one. In November, I advised that everyone stock their pantries and refill their medication in anticipation of Trump taking office. It was always possible that Trump was making shit up and wouldn’t set raise tariff rates, but he generally does things he says he’s going to do if those things will be harmful. So, of course, he announced sweeping increases in tariffs (then walked some back after the stock market crashed but I think it’s probably too late for our economy). Too many still seem not to understand that the country the tariff applies to not the one paying. China isn’t paying a 145% tax on imports to us. Great job, something that came from China and will now cost more than double. Meanwhile federal minimum wage is still $7.25. We’re extremely fucked.

Gif from The Matrix of Switch shaking her head and saying "not like this" — It’s cool to be right, but not like this

The idea I’m stuck on right now is that people do not know where food comes from. I saw a tweet circulating (and it seemed like an earnest one, not a joke) that we grow bananas all over the US, so those prices won’t go up (fact check: you can grow bananas in Hawaii, but not the rest of the US. India and China are the biggest banana exporters). Vanilla comes from Madagascar (47% tariffs) and Mexico. Cinnamon comes from China, Vietnam (46% tariffs), and Indonesia (32% tariffs). And this is to say nothing of coffee and chocolate. Some idiot online suggested that psychopathic YouTube mogul Mr. Beast start growing chocolate in the US. I am not exaggerating when I say people don’t know where food comes from. We are careening into a USSR-like economy because of one man’s hubris and people who think you can grow cacao just anywhere are cheering him on. As Jamelle Bouie writes in The New York Times, “Trump’s tariffs are not a policy as we traditionally understand it. What they are is an instantiation of his psyche: a concrete expression of his zero-sum worldview.” Trump believes you’re winning or you’re losing and he thinks this will make us win. Somehow. We’re all fucking losing now though. Just ask anyone about their 401(k) and you’ll hear all about it.

Gif from Arrested Development of Lucille Bluth saying "I mean, it's one banana, Michael. What could it cost? 10 dollars?" — Our future

Books and Other Words

book cover for Ghost Bride shown in greyscale on kobo ereader — Ghost Bride

Ghost Bride by Yangsze Choo started off a little slow for my taste, but I ultimately enjoyed the story and the peek into another culture’s folklore. The story follows Li Lan, a young woman in colonial Malaysia, who gets an offer from a local wealthy family to be a ghost bride, that is, to wed the family’s recently deceased son so he will have a wife in the afterlife. The ghost of the would-be groom turns out to be a real asshole and starts harassing Li Lan in her dreams, which leads her to seeing a medium and taking some kind of remedy to keep ghosts away. Alas, this goes awry and Li Lan herself nearly dies, sending her on a journey through the spirit world. What really seems to suck about this afterlife is that you can be rich or poor depending on the offerings your descendants make for you. The aforementioned wealthy family is wealthy in death too, and there are other spirits who come to work for them. Imagine dying and still having to work as a housekeeper or some shit. The real nightmare here is capitalism.

book cover for Women in the Valley of the Kings shown in greyscale on kobo ereader — Women in the Valley of the Kings

I do love reading about Egypt and Egyptology, one of my earlier special interests, so when the library’s new book alert newsletter had Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age by Kathleen Sheppard on it, I had to check it out. This book chronicles the careers of a number of women who worked in the field in its infancy and made it what it is today. This book seems to have required extensive archival excavations because most of these women maybe got a mention on the acknowledgements page of men’s work, or they are named in correspondence, but are not big names in their own right. As in many professions, women in Egyptology were hampered by gendered expectations (that they should get married and care for others, for example) that did not hinder men. One of my favorite chapters was about two women, Amice Calverley and Myrtle Broome, who copied down the art in the temple of Seti I (someone has a website about them with the art!). A job like that requires so much knowledge and technical skill, yet the men managing the site expected these women to host any visitors and take care of anyone who stopped by for medical support on top of their existing work. That’s a whole extra job! Anyone could make guests comfortable but not just anyone could accurately re-draw temple art. I really felt for all the people in this book who were just trying to learn and share knowledge but had to do all this extra stuff. Another of the women Sheppard profiles, Caroline Ransom Williams, worked for a while for the Metropolitan Museum of of Art and is the person behind the display of the Egyptian tomb they have there. Yet, this woman was cobbling together work while, as Sheppard puts it, caring for her aging mother and her husband. Sheppard also explains that Caroline tried to encourage the Met to hire some of her male colleagues to replace her, but they wouldn’t because that would require paying them way more, even though Caroline had way more experience. So rude.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

ICE director envisions Amazon-like mass deportation system: ‘Prime, but with human beings’ via Michigan Advance. Imagine the most disgusting, fascist shit possible. Whatever you imagined, this is probably worse. These are the people running our country.
The Social Security Administration Is Gutting Regional Staff and Shifting All Public Communications to X via Wired. Seems like a really bad way to communicate with people who probably don’t use the internet and almost certainly aren’t using “X.”
From X: Young people are calling the em-dash “the ChatGPT hyphen.” They are inventing new ways for me to not sound human! I’ve been called many variations on a robot in my time. I’m sure I’m going to start being told I’m using unedited ChatGPT now all because of my love for the em dash. I’m going to be like that professor accused of being AI in an email (they’re just autistic).
2025 stock market crash via Wikipedia. The devil works fast but Wikipedia editors work faster!
Are People Bad At Their Jobs….or Are The Jobs Just Bad? via Culture Study. It seems like every service we interact with is staffed by people who are bad at what they do. Anne Helen Peterson argues that work is structured in a way that makes it hard for people to do a good job. They’re not hiring enough people or training them well, or they pay structure incentivizes doing a shitty job.

Rampant Consumerism

I mentioned in my last post that I was investigating whether I have acid reflux (I do; more on that shortly) and one thing you can do about it is get an incline pillow. I was already seeing a bunch of instagram ads for complicated pillow systems for hypermobile people (because hypermobility means it takes more work to hold your body up, so a big-ass pillow can feel good), and one of them is also billing itself as an “acid reflux relief system” so I was like okay let’s try it. I bought the MedCline pillow and it is very comfortable. It feels really cozy to nest in it and read. I am, unfortunately, still trying to get adjusted to actually sleeping on it though, mostly because you need to lie on your side for it to work right and I usually sleep on my back. Some nights I’m waking up halfway through and swapping in my regular pillows and other nights I try to fall asleep in it and give up. Still, I am hopeful I will adjust. It really does feel like it’s helping. The main downside is that it’s interrupting Fritz’s ability to cuddle with me. He likes to sleep between my feet or in the crook of my arm, neither of which are possible if I’m wrapped around a body pillow. In short: I’m a monster.

With the gigantic new pillow situation, I also suggested to Kirk that we should get a king bed (we have been sharing a queen for years). I’ve brought it up before but he likes to sleep on the very edge like a neglected orphan so he was like “why?” I finally said that I want a bigger bed and he was like, well that’s all you had to say. I also made the case that if we are going to buy anything, we have to do it before tariffs make everything twice as expensive, so we went ahead and ordered a Big Fig mattress and a bigger version of the same Ikea bed frame that we’ve been using (everyone hates change!). The mattress has yet to arrive but I will report back once we get the new bed set up.

Corporeal Form

I’ve learned that some of my health issues have been acid reflux all along! Did you know that it is not normal to burp all the time? I thought it was because most of my family is like that. It’s also not normal to have to blow your nose and cough up gunk all the time, especially when you’re already taking allergy medication (I take a pill and a spray daily as it is). I started taking a daily acid reflux pill and I’m feeling a lot better. I’m once again shocked to learn that I’ve had an ongoing health condition and didn’t realize it because I thought that’s how being alive felt. I didn’t even know I was feeling acidity until I went away. I am glad to finally be taking care of some of these problems but aggravated that I’ve spent years suffering for nothing.

What’s really fucking me up about this situation is that the strategies for dealing with acid reflux are in conflict with things I’m doing for my other ailments. Since I’ve learned more about hypermobility, I’ve accepted that it takes more energy to hold my body up that it does for most people and have made lounging and lying down a big part of my day. It’s great. Unfortunately, acid reflux requires you to stay upright for a few hours after eating so the acid doesn’t come back up and attack you. Another suggestion is to eat more frequent, smaller meals throughout the day. So, if it feels bad to lie down for two or three hours after eating, and I’m supposed to eat less but more often, when does the lying down happen? I am struggling. I have been spending a lot more time at my computer (probably why I’m playing minesweeper!), which kind of sucks because it took me years of practice to not spend all day on the computer. I’m getting stressed out in the evenings about eating dinner early enough so I can lie down. It’s not going great. This all makes me feel like I need to eat a whole bunch in a panic so that I will have lying down time later, which is also a bad idea for several reasons, not the least because I finally learned how to stop binge eating in the last few years (the un-glamorous secret: once you stop restricting calories and telling yourself you can’t have certain foods, you will level out). I’m not sure what to do about this, or if there is anything I can do about this. It’s hard and I’m upset so I’m writing about it. Hopefully things will get easier as I get more accustomed to dealing with this.

Kitchen Witchery

I made a few good dishes this week. I tried the chili con carne recipe from The Bean Book and it was delicious. I simmered it extra long so the meat would be tender and that was a good choice. We had that with biscuits and roasted carrots topped with goat cheese. I tried this NY Times recipe for spicy sesame noodles with chicken and peanuts. The instructions note you can use substitute tofu for the chicken so I gave that a try for lunch a few days ago. I liked the cooking method but the flavor wasn’t that strong. Maybe I used the wrong type of chili or maybe this is a classic case of NYT cooking making something bland. I poured some other sauce I had on hand over the leftovers and liked that, so I think I will keep this as a recipe but just use another sauce. Finally, I’ve been desperately wanting some good coffee cake for the last few weeks, so I made the Smitten Kitchen New York crumb cake. It was so good. This is the correct cake:crumb ratio and I will not be taking questions about it.

A bowl of chili con carne—beans and chunks of meat are visible—topped with sour cream — Chili con carne

A skilled full of udon, tofu crumbles, and peanuts, festively topped with chopped chives — Chili con carne

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat in a too-small play tent on top of the dining table. His legs are hanging out one end and we can see his face through a little window. — this ridiculous child

Fritz the cat in a corner in front of the mirrored closet door. The sun is hitting him directly and reflecting off the mirror to sun his back, — this ridiculous child

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: March 30, 2025

Posted on March 30, 2025 by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. As usual, so much is happening. I was thinking about writing a mini-essay on recent events, like our top government officials using a group chat to plan bombing campaigns. I’m not really sure what I can add to this discussion though, so I will refrain from saying much. However, I do want to note that, although it is very funny (funny sad, not funny ha-ha) that they are so stupid that they added the Atlantic editor to the war plans chat (it is also funny that half the group chats in the country are now nicknamed things like “⁨war secrets group chat [secure!]”), it is not funny that they are bombing Yemen. Last I checked, we are not at war with Yemen and Congress has not declared a war. Yet, we’re just bombing countries willy-nilly. What is wrong with this country. Also a celebrated scholar of fascism just left his job at Yale to move to Canada. Seems like a bad sign!

Other than our crumbling society, I had a really interesting conversation while volunteering at the Lavender Library on Friday. I was chatting with a fellow volunteer who has been working there a long time and who is old enough to be my mom, and she mentioned that it’s very hard to keep up with what the younger people are listening to and watching and saying. Our culture is so fractured though that I don’t think it’s possible for anyone to “keep up.” I’m certainly not. I just learned who Dua Lipa was last year and she’s a pretty big pop star at this point (it’s okay if you still don’t know who Dua Lipa is). Thirty years ago you could turn on the TV and everyone had more or less the same access to the same culture, maybe your friend had cable or HBO and you didn’t, but even then, there was only so much you could get. With the way the internet is now, you could make a full-time job of watching, reading, or listening to things and it’s possible to have zero overlap with your peers. There’s no Saturday morning cartoons anymore and we have Top 40 radio but it seems like Taylor Swift took that over. The good here is that you can really dig into the things you like. If you love obscure music, you don’t have to travel to the record store two hours away to find your favorites; everything is on Spotify or Apple Music or BandCamp now. Way more people have the ability to create and share their art than they used to, which is honestly one of the best things about the internet. So, the idea of keeping up with the culture kind of doesn’t even exist anymore. Most of us are out of step with our local mainstream in some form or another. I know this is true based on experience—just try telling anyone how excited you are for Eurovision (I am very excited for Eurovision)!

XKCD comic reading "I try not to make fun of people for admitting they don't know things. Because for each thing "everyone knows" by the time they're adults, every day there are, on average, 10,000 people in the US hearing about it for the first time. If I make fun of people, I train them not to tell me when they have those moments. And I miss out on the fun." — from XKCD.com

Books and Other Words

Cover of the book Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution. It's light purple with an illustration of a raised fist. — Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution

I found Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution by Shiri Eisner in the stacks at the Lavender Library and decided to check it out since I haven’t done much reading about bisexuality. I liked this book a lot, especially since it takes a radical perspective. Eisner states that in contrast to “liberal politics, whose goal is to gain access to power structures, radical politics criticizes the very structures and ultimately seeks to take them apart.” This is the best explanation I’ve seen of radicalism yet. The book goes a little further than the usual “bisexual myths” discourse that we are often stuck with. Eisner instead focuses on trying to “extract [bisexuality’s] enormous subversive potential” instead of “normalizing” it the way a lot of works try to do. So, instead of being like “it’s fine an normal to be bi!” Eisner is saying “being bi is different and that actually gives us a unique perspective on society and positions us to make radical change,” which is a very cool approach! One of the most interesting subjects in this book is the concept that bisexuality poses a threat to how society understands itself. Homosexuality is considered more legible to heterosexuals because at least they like just one group of people. Bisexuality makes it harder for people to disavow homosexuality and it calls into question everyone’s sexuality, which freaks people out. Eisner writes that bisexual women are threatening to patriarchy because they “are thought to embody the choice of whether or not to have relationships with men.” Oop!

book cover for The Coin shown in greyscale on kobo ereader — The Coin

Yasmin Zaher’s The Coin is a chronicle of a particular brand of madness. It’s an uncomfortable book—deliberately so—which makes it hard to say whether it’s “good” or not and I’m not even sure I liked it, to be honest. The story’s narrator and protagonist is a rich Palestinian woman who has moved to New York. She’s contemptuous of most everyone and everything in America and takes refuge in elaborate skincare routines that she spends hours at a time on after stocking up on products at CVS (thus earning this ritual the name “CVS retreat”). The narrator works as an English teacher at an all-boys school and leads her classes in ways that would probably get most people fired. She befriends a fashionable man who turns out to be homeless and who convinces her to help him with a scam involving luxury handbags. Despite my ambivalence, this is a well-written work. There are some pithy lines like the US being the “only country in the world with the cultural practice of school shootings.” We see the narrator really lose her grip at the end of the book. Is it the pressure of fitting into another culture? Some kind of demonic possession? Just being an insufferable person? The novel is content to leave us wondering.

book cover for A Desolation Called Peace shown in greyscale on kobo ereader — A Desolation Called Peace

A Desolation Called Peace by Arkady Martine is the sequel to A Memory Called Empire, which I talked about two posts ago. This book is, even more than its predecessor, focused on the question of what it means to be people. Our protagonist from the first book, Ambassador Mahit Dzmare, gets dragged into the plot by her former liaison Three Seagrass who has somewhat broken protocol to appoint herself to a mission to help the Teixcalaani empire figure out how to communicate with the aliens that are killing the fleet at an alarming pace. That might sound convoluted but it’s very well done. It’s just hard to stuff this big, science fiction concept into a few sentences. I hope Martine writes more books because I really like her perspective and her world-building.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Attorney General Bonta Urgently Issues Consumer Alert for 23andMe Customers via California Department of Justice. If you did a 23andMe DNA test, you truly must delete your account. The company is going out of business and we have no idea who will end up with the DNA data it has collected over the years.
Tesla owners are trading in cars at record rates amid Musk backlash via The Washington Post. Lol. Lmao even. By the way, they’re recalling almost all the Cybertrucks. I love to see it.
The right dominates the online media ecosystem, seeping into sports, comedy, and other supposedly nonpolitical spaces via Media Matters. Despite conservative complaints about the “liberal media,” the online media ecosystem is “dominated” by right-wing opinions, and conservative shows are much more popular than liberal ones. The report found, for example, that “Nine out of the 10 online shows with the largest followings across platforms were right-leaning, with a total following of more than 197 million.” Yikes.
The Pandemic Never Ended via The New Republic. On the ongoing pandemic, long covid, and the way the government is handling (ignoring) it all. From the article, “Today, people say ‘during the pandemic’ when they mean ‘during lockdown.’ This distinction—or lack thereof—upsets me; though I try to remember that people don’t mean to offend. This is the product of ignorance and misinformation, coming from the top down.”

Doing Things

We went to the ballet again and it was cool! I have no big thoughts about it but I was happy to go and hang out with my friends. This was the last show of the Sac Ballet season and we already bought tickets for next season, so now I am looking forward to more outings.

A ticket for Sacramento Ballet Visions 2025 held up. The stage with a blue curtain is in the background. — Visions 2025

Corporeal Form

I’m really going through it with my body. I came to the sudden realization a few weeks ago that it’s become rather difficult for me to breathe. I was emptying the dishwasher like, hey I’m really out of breath right now. And, you know, that’s not a strenuous activity. Everything has been feeling very challenging because of it. You actually need air to function. My friends reminded me that it was probably time to talk to the doctor and of course they were right. I told the doctor that I (really we, since these findings were from the friend quorum) thought I might have asthma. This week I did a pulmonary function test about it. I was worried we wouldn’t learn anything from it and, unfortunately, we only learned that my lungs are functioning fine. This is good but then it’s like, okay, now what. I’ve noticed that doctors have a tendency to see a test result, let you know things look good, then forget that the problem persists despite having nice test results. So, I followed up with my doctor and she ordered a chest x-ray and also mentioned that acid reflux could be a cause of breathing issues, which was news to me.

I have been feeling a little more acidic lately and I had chalked it up to that devil perimenopause, but we have antacids in the house so I figured let’s experiment. I took one and, before long, my airways were free of gunk, and I wasn’t coughing or burping like I often am. And, yes, I was breathing a bit better. That lasted for a few hours and then my throat started hurting again and the gunk reasserted itself. I think I’ve had acid reflux (or worse?) the whole time and not realized it because it always feels that way.

I’m so frustrated with my health because I feel like I’m trying really hard to take care of myself, but I can’t figure out that things are wrong with me if things have always been wrong. When I got a special glasses prescription and started doing physical therapy for binocular vision dysfunction, my head stopped hurting and I realized I’d had a permanent headache. I only registered “headache” when it was worse than usual, without acknowledging the constant, low-grade pain. Once that stopped hurting, I was able to realize that my jaw was bothering me, and I got diagnosed with TMJ dysfunction. I’m peeling away layers of physical issues and I keep discovering more issues underneath that I wasn’t able to isolate from the symphony of physical signals. I’m sure part of this due to the autism, which is infamous for making us struggle to connect to our physical sensations. However, I think a significant part of the problem is that I’ve had to learn to care for myself as an adult in a way I didn’t get when I was growing up. My dad recently told us that he figured we were fine if we weren’t bleeding. It’s taken a long time to unlearn the idea that so much discomfort is normal and it’s good to seek help. I have a kind of learned helplessness about a lot of little things like this. Fortunately Kirk and my friends often help me recognize that there are different ways to do things and I don’t have to be uncomfortable. It feels so stupid to not even realize that my body is hurting but I’m doing my best. We’re slowly getting somewhere.

I’m planning to pick up some more powerful over-the-counter medication and see how I feel. I do feel notably better even with the basic meds, so I am curious to see how this shakes out and report back to my doctor. I’m glad this doctor is being more helpful than most, but I wish doctors would have a little more curiosity. There has to be a better way to help people like me figure out what their problems are. I often don’t even tell the doctor something until I’ve read up on an issue and find myself saying “oh no, I bet I have that too.” I’m often right (not always, but often enough). Why do doctors never ask about symptoms? It’s just, how are you? Ma’am, I have no fucking idea. You’re the doctor.

Kitchen Witchery

Last week I roasted a chicken for dinner and we had that with some vegetables and butternut squash risotto. I have probably said this before (and shared photos that look exactly the same) but roasting a chicken well feels like the pinnacle of a certain kind of cooking to me. I feel so much pride for being able to roast a good chicken. Last week I also made some really good burgers with blue cheese and caramelized onions, but I forgot to take a picture! In desserts, I made these absolutely delicious caramel bars with candied peanuts (recipe from 100 Cookies). They’re kind of like a millionaire’s shortbread plus peanuts. They have a shortbread base, caramel layer, candied peanuts, and chocolate on top. I will certainly make these again because they are fucking good.

A plate with a chicken leg, roasted carrots and green beans, butternut squash risotto, and a roll — chicken dinner photo that is probably identical to a past photo

cross section shot of caramel bars with candied peanuts showing a shortbread base, a thick layer of caramel topped with caramelized peanuts, and covered with chocolate — chicken dinner photo that is probably identical to a past photo

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. This fucking guy.

me and Fritz. Fritz is leaning against my chest. His back fee and one of his front feet are in my hand and his head is tucked upsidedown into my elbow — cuddle cat

I'm lying on my stomach and titling my face up to the camera. Fritz is standing on my back and giving the camera a wide-eyed stare — cuddle cat

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: March 16, 2025

Posted on March 16, 2025 by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. First, the news you are all waiting for: the shower is finally, completely finished. They installed the doors last week and have been using it since. I hope I never have to remodel this shower again. Exhausting! It looks really nice though and somehow it feels like there is more room inside. I’m not sure how, but I’m willing to live with that mystery.

Newly remodeled shower with the door installed and everything — it’s finally done!

Me after getting a haircut. My hair is just a bit past my shoulders — short hairs

As much as I like the look of long hair and being able to style it in fun ways, it was long enough that it was making me insane so on Friday I went to have a bunch chopped off. It feels a lot better! It hasn’t been this short in a while—and it’s not really that short—but it feels a lot different. The only bummer is I won’t be able to do buns on top of my head with short hair, but I suppose I can do it with just the top half of the hair instead. It’s a necessary sacrifice.

Current Events

PSA: Social Security Is Your Money

The so-called Department of Government Efficiency is pushing big administrative cuts at the Social Security Administration and looking to cut half their staff. This could, as the former Social Security Commissioner stated, lead to “system collapse and an interruption of benefits … within the next 30 to 90 days.” This could be a precursor to cutting Social Security benefits, as the Center for American Progress notes, given that Musk has publicly stated that “Social Security is the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time.” Fact check: it’s not. What makes me insane about this strain of thought is that we all pay into Social Security. It’s not a special gift from the government. When you get a paycheck, you pay 6.2% of it in Social Security taxes and your employer matches that, for 12.4% total. That’s it. So when government-hating conservatives talk about “cutting” Social Security, they are talking about stealing our money that we already earned and paid into the system.

I highly recommend that everyone sets up an account on the Social Security website, https://www.ssa.gov/onlineservices/, and downloads their Social Security Statement. It probably won’t save us, but you will at least have a record of what you’ve paid in to Social Security to date. The statement shows your earnings record (the amount of money your Social Security tax is based on) and an estimate of how much money you will get from Social Security when you retire. If Musk does successfully gut the Social Security Administration, you’ll have a record of how much of your money they stole and it will be easier to make a claim to what you’re owed (in theory). I hope this won’t be necessary but I’m not holding my breath.

screenshot from my social security statement showing the amount I earned in the years 2003–2006 — Social Security Earnings Record

A chart showing my estimated monthly benefit depending on how old I am when I retire — Social Security Earnings Record

Gavin Newsom, Shut Up!

California governor Gavin Newsom has the easiest job in the world right now. All he needs to do is say no to the things Trump wants and keep California on track. It’s that simple. I am certain he wants to run for president in 2028. He could emerge as a leader in sane governance by guiding us through the Trump shitshow.

And yet.

In the last two weeks this fucking idiot has squandered whatever remaining good will he had from liberals and leftists (which wasn’t too much to begin with I think, but still). He also pissed off the entire state workforce by unilaterally demanding that state employees work four days a week in the office instead of the current two (the union is taking a complaint to the Public Employee Relations Board). Gavin took to his new podcast (side note: does this man have nothing better to do right now??) to complain about trans women in sports. Trans people’s rights are under attack across the board, so why is Gavin taking time out of his busy schedule to be a shithead? Beyond the cruelty of this, like … why? So few transwomen are competing in high-level sports and it’s literally the last fucking issue I care about right now. Trump is firing half the Department of Education and Gavin wants to complain about 10 people playing sports? Dude, shut up! Also, what happened to the Mayor of San Francisco version of Gavin Newsom, the Newsom who decided to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples before it was technically legal? Where did he go?

Newsom’s new podcast is apparently specifically for talking to MAGA people that he ostensibly disagrees with, to “understand what the motivations are, the legitimacy of those motivations, and just really understand where people are coming from.” My guy, we are 10 years into Trump world. We know why people support him. You are not even a journalist, so just shut up and govern your state like we elected you to do. There is no need to have a discussion with Steve fucking Bannon. This is a guy throwing Nazi salutes in public and whose political strategy is to “flood the zone with shit” because “the real opposition is the media.” Giving Bannon a platform to “debate” him is just providing him with another opportunity to pretend to be legitimate while spewing more shit. Creating another venue for these people to share their unchecked views is not helping anyone, so: shut up, Gavin!

Tweet from Pop Base that says King Charles is launching a podcast with the comment from user Memeulous "Whether you're a peasant or a king the urge to make a podcast burns like a thousand suns within all of us men" — Men yearn to podcast

More News to Keep an Eye On

I can’t get into every insane thing that is happening, but here are some more important stories:

The Department of Homeland Security arrested Mahmoud Khalil, “a Palestinian “a recent Columbia University graduate who helped lead the Gaza solidarity encampment.” This man has a green card and is a permanent resident, yet they have detained him. This is extremely troubling. From Al-Jazeera, “The Trump administration wants to criminalise any dissent of Israel’s genocide, any dissent of the US’s role in it, and they’re willing to roll back all of our rights to do that.” Later in the week, they arrested another Palestinian student involved in the Columbia University protests. This is really bad.
Trump let Musk turn the White House lawn into a car dealership. As Parker Molloy of The Present Age explains, “The whole spectacle was exactly what you’d expect when a billionaire president with a long history of self-promotion teams up with his billionaire buddy who helped bankroll his campaign. It was cronyism in its purest form, taking place on the grounds of what’s supposed to be the people’s house.” The government isn’t supposed to be a money-making venture! That’s why government employees and contractors (like myself) have to take those trainings every year about not accepting bribes or dinner from anyone. It’s a whole thing! There are tons of rules!
The recession is about to hit hard. I’m pretty sure it’s already started but we’re not deep into it yet. CNN reports this week that “Dollar General warns low-income Americans’ finances are getting worse.” Unfortunately, many people in this country shop a lot at discount stores like this so I think Dollar General does have its finger on the economic pulse. The article also notes that “Dollar General is seeing middle-income consumers trade down into shopping at stores in recent weeks,” which suggests that middle-income people are either anticipating less money and are tightening their budgets in anticipation, or they may already be losing money or losing ground against inflation.

Books and Other Words

Book cover for Iron Curtain shown on kobo ereader — Iron Curtain

Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956 by Anne Applebaum details how the USSR took over Eastern Europe, focusing on East Germany, Poland, and Hungary. The book is extensively researched and is based on interviews plus historical documents. I wanted to read it both as a student of history and for some perspective on what we’re living through (or, perhaps, about to live through). Applebaum starts by describing the devastation in Eastern Europe after World War II, and how the Red Army arriving to liberate people from the Nazis was something to feel grateful for. As one person noted, “everyone there had the same feeling, that the world would finally turn into a different one, and that it really had been worthwhile for us to be born,” which, oof. I feel like this is something that people in my generation might say too. Of course, the Red Army wasn’t there to help, they were there to further the USSR’s interests. Something I didn’t realize about this period was that, because everywhere was so thoroughly destroyed, after the concentration camps were emptied of Nazi prisoners, the Soviets turned right around and started using the same camps for other purposes because they were one of the only structures still standing. That must have been awful. Another “fun” fact was that lots of people were staying and partying (playing jazz records and dancing) at the YMCA, which eventually got shut down for being a “tool of bourgeois-fascism.” Jazz music and dressing colorfully and festively eventually became signs of resistance, but then, everything was a way to resist when the government was dictating from the top down how to think and act and behave.

The most interesting chapter to me was on “reluctant collaborators,” which refers to the “Millions of people [who] did not necessarily believe all of the slogans they read in the newspaper, but neither did they feel compelled to denounce those who were writing them. They did not necessarily believe that Stalin was an infalible leader, but they did not tear down his portraits.” Of course that made me think about what we’re living through. I think most people don’t want the federal government to be torn apart but a lot of people are perhaps shrugging and not really raging against it either. As Applebaum writes, “The extraordinary achievement of Soviet communism … was the system’s ability to get so many apolitical people in so many countries to play along without much protest.” I think that certainly applies to our time too. So many people aren’t “interested in politics” or are apathetic in one way or another. Perhaps people would feel less apathetic (more … pathetic?) if we could figure out how to invest in our shared reality. The internet and media have fully fractured our discourse; we have no monoculture and we don’t get our sense of reality from a shared source like the nightly news. The Soviets used the radio for propaganda and seemed to believe that there wasn’t anything propaganda couldn’t overcome. Yet, Radio Free Europe, a station broadcast by the Americans in West Germany, “ultimately proved effective not because it offered counterpropaganda but because it reliably reported the news of the day.” That’s what we need now. We need reliable information that from reporters who aren’t just acting as stenographers and who can explain why things are important. Applebaum concludes, “Before a nation can be rebuilt, its citizens need to understand how it was destroyed in the first place: how its institutions were undermined, how its language was twisted, how its people were manipulated.” The Eastern Bloc countries succeeded in this, but we in the United States of the 21st century aren’t ready.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Everything you say to your Echo will be sent to Amazon starting on March 28 via Ars Technica. If you have an Echo, beware. Amazon is changing its policy so that it now keeps all your recordings and uploads them to their servers, presumably to use in training AI. From the article, “Likely looking to get ahead of these concerns, Amazon said in its email today that by default, it will delete recordings of users’ Alexa requests after processing. However, anyone with their Echo device set to ‘Don’t save recordings’ will see their already-purchased devices’ Voice ID feature bricked.” Amazon said, let us keep all your data or get fucked!
Meet the Feminist Resistance Fighter Who Created the Modern Kitchen via Gastro Obscura. Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky was an architect and was part of the resistance against the Nazis in Vienna and she sounds like a very cool lady. She designed the Frankfurt kitchen, which most modern kitchen designs are based on. Her architectural work centered women’s needs. I had never heard of her before! Another unsung hero of the modern age.
Super Nintendo Hardware Is Running Faster as It Ages via 404 Media. I don’t claim to understand it but I do find this news fun and delightful.

Wikipedia

I am proud to report that I have now made over 1,000 edits on English Wikipedia, which puts me in the 0.1% of Wikipedians by edit count. I recently got a lot of edits in a short time because I started contributing to WikiProject Short descriptions, which is a project to make sure all the articles have a, well, short description (it’s the tiny summary that pops up under an article’s name in the search results). I can do a lot of them in not a lot of time and it’s moderately interesting and gives me something to click at, so I’ve done a whole bunch (literally hundreds haha).

Knitting and Crafts

We had a small tear in our fitted sheet, presumably the result of Fritz being a menace, and I bravely decided to mend it. It’s a very small job but I am proud of it so here it is. I used the mattress stitch, which I know how to do from knitting, but I figured it would be the same principle with a needle and thread.

about a one-inch long tear in my bedsheet — a minor tear in my sheet

a slightly ugly but competently patched tear in the bed sheet. — a minor tear in my sheet

Riding high on the victory from mending the sheet, I then patched up this stuffed animal that has been in need of repair for a long time. It’s easy to make that look neat when all its fluff covers up the stitching! Significant Otter is no longer at risk of losing his stuffing.

an otter plushie with the stuffing exposed on the bottom between its tail and foot — otter in need of repair

underside of my otter stuffed animal with the tear stitched up and the patch job invisible in its fur — otter in need of repair

Kitchen Witchery

a big glass bowl full of khichdi — instant-pot khichdi

In the spirit of transparency, I am sharing a recipe I did not like. This is instant pot khichdi, which is made of rice and lentils and sounded good to me. Unfortunately, I did not think it tasted good. Perhaps the NY Times version of this recipe is to blame? I think this is the kind of food that every Indian household has their own version of, so maybe there’s one out there I would love. But for this one, I did not appreciate the little chunks of tomato (I thought they would cook down more than they did) and I think the coriander seed bits were bad for my guts. That’s on me though, not NYT Cooking; I should have known better. Anyway, I ate one bowl of it then gave up and discarded the leftovers.

I tried making another loaf from start to finish in the new bread machine and it came out better this time. I learned that I can tell the machine to go to the next part of the process and that I can save that as a setting for next time. The loaf shape looks a little weird to me, but I think that might be because you expect the top of the loaf to puff up in the oven, but in the machine, the sides of the loaf are still touching pan, so the result looks a little funny. However, the bread was just fine. Another loaf or two and I will have the system perfected—and just in time for summer.

A loaf made from start to finish in the bread machine. It's proportions look just a little off. Like the uncanny valley of bread — bread machine bread round two

Cross section of the bread machine loaf. It looks totally normal and good — bread machine bread round two

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. This guy just loves being inside of things.

Fritz the cat hunkered down in the bathroom sink and very focused on the birds outside the window (not pictured) — Locked in

Fritz the cat lounging inside a hoodie that I draped over the side of the couch — Locked in

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: March 2, 2025

Posted on March 2, 2025 by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. You will all be glad to hear that my shower is finally almost done. The contractor worked all week last week and got it basically finished. However, it still needs a door (…details). I’ve been informed that this should maybe show up on Monday. The good news is the work is close enough to done that I was able to clean and start using the en suite bathroom again, which is a great relief to me. The shower looks very nice, I would just like to be able to use it and be done. If I ever have to get this remodeled again, I will scream.

Newly remodeled shower, featuring Fritz the cat sniffing around and investigating — shower inspector

Current Events

This is still not a news blog but I want to gather my thoughts on what’s happening with disabilities right now, starting with vaccines. It’s upsetting that vaccines, which improved population-level health so notably in the 20th century, are being undermined by conspiracy theories and “skeptics.” Vaccines work. For the record, vaccines do not cause autism. Most people start noticing signs of autism in their kids around the same time that kids start getting vaccines. That’s it. People who would rather risk a preventable disease killing their child rather than—in their minds—put them at risk of autism make me so sad. They would rather have a potentially dead kid than a living autistic kid. Speaking as an autistic adult: that fucking sucks. Autistic people deserve to live. If anyone wants sources on this subject, the Maintenance Phase podcast did a thorough episode called RFK Jr. and The Mainstreaming Of The Anti-Vaxx Movement and their website has a bunch of links to their sources.

Anyway, the current part of these events is that our new secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert Kennedy Jr., is hard at work doing things that will probably make it harder to get vaccines, or get vaccines at all. This week, he cancelled (or possibly postponed, but it sounds like cancelled) a meeting where scientists determine which strain of the flu they should vaccinate against this year. Does that mean we won’t get a flu shot this year? The Centers for Disease Control and Infection (CDC) was also “ordered to shelve some promotions it created for a variety of vaccines, including a campaign touting seasonal flu shots.” This also sucks because vaccines work better when more people get them. This is all happening amid the worst flu season since before the pandemic and when there’s a measles outbreak that has killed at least one person. Measles had been classified as eliminated since the year 2000, but through sheer grit and determination, Americans have revived it. I can’t top what The Onion has to say about this: RFK Jr. Vows To Make Measles Deaths So Common They Won’t Be Upsetting Anymore. Thanks, guys.

The other aspect of RFK Jr.’s, … I want to say policy positions? Beliefs? Plans? Random wishes he is attempting to manifest? that has been circulating recently is that he does not want any of us on SSRIs (antidepressants), adderall, or basically any drugs that help level out our brains. And he thinks we should be on “farms.” Futurism.com reported on these remarks last summer:

“I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to, to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need — three or four years if they need it — to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities,” he said during the broadcast.

This has become a bit of a meme lately and, whenever I see it, I tell my friends I hope we end up on the same farm. But I’m laughing so I don’t cry.

I think this has taken off recently in context of the Executive Order dated February 13, 2025 titled “Establishing the President’s Make America Healthy Again Commission.” The EO mentions the rate of ADHD and autism, among other physical health issues, then states:

This poses a dire threat to the American people and our way of life. Seventy-seven percent of young adults do not qualify for the military based in large part on their health scores. Ninety percent of the Nation’s $4.5 trillion in annual healthcare expenditures is for people with chronic and mental health conditions. In short, Americans of all ages are becoming sicker, beset by illnesses that our medical system is not addressing effectively. These trends harm us, our economy, and our security.

Autism and ADHD aren’t “threats to the American way of life.” They’re just another way that brains work. The real tell here is they are worried about having enough people to enlist in the military. Just a suggestion: what if we didn’t maintain the world’s largest military and over 700 bases worldwide? That might help with the staffing shortage.

I don’t know what the real end game here is for anyone these right-wing jackasses deem unfit. I do know that there’s an active suit from multiple states attempting to end Section 504, which is what grants all children the right to a free and appropriate education, regardless of what disabilities they may have. I do know that Trump and his administration are tacking “accessibility” onto “diversity, equity, and inclusion” for a “DEIA” acronym when they’re telling federal workers that they’re useless and air traffic controllers that they’re doing a bad job. I do know that many of the pieces of our social safety net that Trump is threatening are key to making sure disabled people can participate in society. Finally, and I hate that this sounds paranoid (but I don’t think it is paranoid), we also know that disabled people were the first victims of the Nazi regime. Do I think Trump or RFK Jr. or Russel Vaught are going to put me on a “wellness farm” because I’m autistic. I don’t know. However, I am deeply troubled that they appear to be laying the legal groundwork to justify doing so. They are going to make it harder to exist as a disabled person so they can complain that we’re a drain on society. They’re making big investments in prisons (discussed in my previous post) to detain immigrants (for now). I don’t think it takes a Ph.D. in history to see where this could go. The U.S. has put people in internment camps before and I believe it could happen again. It’s happening right now, with thousands of people being held in ICE detention centers.

I wish I could end this section with something hopeful or a suggestion for things to do. I don’t know what to do beyond the usual stuff: get involved in your community, participate in mutual aid, stay informed, have a backup plan. I am scared. Seeing the news about that EO really fucked me up. I spent a whole day vibrating with anxiety. I expected Trump round two to be a horrorshow but I didn’t think we’d escalate to “what if we put the disabled people in camps” so quickly. Sometimes I just write about this stuff to not feel crazy. I see things on instagram like “haha we’re gonna be insufferable unmedicated on the RFK Jr. wellness farm!” and I laugh but the blog is where I take the time to look it up and see what did he actually say. Where did that information come from. Did something get lost in translation as it traveled through social media. I think this particular strain of news is as bad as they’re making it out to be online. Things could get really ugly. I don’t know what else to say, so here’s a picture (valued at 1,000 words).

Books and Other Words

cover for the book A Memory Called Empire shown on kobo ereader — A Memory Called Empire

I have a (bad?) habit of reading the first book in a series, buying the following books, then not getting to the rest of the series for years because I want to re-read the first book so I can fully appreciate the next ones. To that end, I recently re-read Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire because I still haven’t read the sequel, A Desolation Called Peace. I was hoping to find what I wrote about this book when I first read it in 2019 because I remember loving it although I got a little lost by the end. However, I read it just before I started writing here regularly. so my opinions are lost to time. I really do remember losing the plot and getting confused, even though it was totally clear to me this time around. It made me reflect on the fact that I think I’ve gotten better at reading, as strange as that sounds, even though reading is a skill like anything else, since doing vision therapy a few years ago. The words I read are staying in my brain more strongly because I’m not using all my energy on physically focusing my eyes. As for the book itself: I love it. It’s about Mahit Dzmare, a woman who grew up on a space station just outside the Teixcalaanli empire. She’s selected to be the station’s ambassador in the empire’s capital. There is, of course, a ton of intrigue and politicking and there is even a revolution and attempted coup (too close to home?). The world Martine created is so detailed and rich, and I think that is because she is also a scholar of the Byzantine empire. There are a number of science fiction writers who are also academics and I find that they are writing some of the most immersive worlds (Ada Palmer is another author who comes to mind). A Memory Called Empire also deals with the tension of not being a part of the dominant, colonizer culture and wanting to belong while also not wanting to lose one’s identity. I also appreciated the linguistic and literary elements in the story; there’s a lot of discourse about poetry and allusion and how the language of the empire works differently than that of Mahit’s native culture.

This probably sounds silly but I feel embarrassed if I only have one book to talk about from the last two weeks. I know no one cares but me, and I certainly wouldn’t care if someone told me they “only” read one book in the last fortnight. And yet. Maybe by my next post I’ll have finished all the books I’m in the middle of.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

1 in 5 Americans Are Doom Spending via creditcards.com. It’s me. I’m one in five Americans.
War Robot Put On a 30-Minute DJ Set at a California Club via Vice. I am once again begging people to make technology that does the boring stuff, like taxes or sorting recycling, instead of making art. Art is the point of being alive. Besides, do you think a robot could do this?
Microsoft to Shut Down Skype: Farewell to the ‘Rotary Phone’ of Communications via CNET. Bad news for everyone who meets with their language teachers online: Skype is being decommissioned. Some of you might say “Skype is still around?” but every single person I’ve taken a language class from is using Skype because it’s easy and accessible and does what we need it to do. I’ve been pitching Signal as an alternative since it seems like it does have a screenshare option, but it’s annoying to have to change to new software just because Microsoft doesn’t feel like maintaining it! Make it open source, you cowards!
Bone Into Stone via The Dial. I just love Jhumpa Lahiri!
How To Be a Fighter When You Feel Like a Punching Bag via Organizing My Thoughts. From the article:

More and more often, I am seeing people live the entirety of their political lives, or at least, the vast majority of their political lives, on social media. I am not talking about people whose organizing largely occurs virtually, as there are many ways that people engage with activism digitally (including meetings, webinars, discussion groups, and other projects that are largely conducted online), but rather, people whose political existence is mostly or completely confined to the infrastructure of social media. For such people, the ability to work across differences is often lacking or entirely absent, because social media does not involve that kind of engagement. Social media is a performance-based technology. Collective action is not performance-based. It is grounded in relationships, cooperation, and an ability to prioritize shared objectives.”

Media

February 24th is Twin Peaks day, so I felt that would be the right day to start watching this cult classic TV Show. I have only heard good things about it, mostly from Lito, whose taste I have complete trust in. My mom also corroborated this and said she loved watching it when it originally came out. My initial thoughts (three episodes deep) are that it is cool and interesting and weird. I do wonder, however, how Laura Palmer had time for all of her activities. She was tutoring someone, running Meals on Wheels, and had like 15 boyfriends? What is going on? Moreover, will I ever know what is going on (based on this show’s reputation: no).

Rampant Consumerism

My bread machine, which served me faithfully for I think ten years, was getting some kind of corrosion on the bottom of the pan where it connects to the thing that makes the paddle spin. I had been coveting a fancy new bread machine for a while (not the least because I was disgusted to find that our pantry moth infestation last year also led to moths in the machine, which I cleared out with a handheld vacuum. I know they were not in my bread but still … yuck). Since buying a new pan cost almost as much as we originally paid for the bread machine, I decided to just get the fancy new one. I am now the proud owner of this Zojirushi bread machine. It has a lot more settings, the pan has two paddles and is wider so when you bake bread in there, it comes out in a normal loaf shape, and it has a little window so you can see the dough! I use the bread machine probably at least weekly so I know I am going to get my money’s worth. I am also looking forward to experimenting with baking cakes and other things in there, especially in the summer when it’s too hot to live, let alone turn on the oven. I tested it for a dough that I baked in the oven and that worked well. I tried out the “homemade” mode, where you can set all the kneading and rising times, then the machine beeps at you so you can take the loaf out and shape it and return it to the machine to bake. I used the recommended timing for this and my dough rose too high and then collapsed during the baking process. It’s still edible but the texture is a little off. It’s going to take me a few tries to get it just right, I think, but we’re gonna get there.

Zojirushi bread machine, a rising loaf is visible through its window — new bread machine in action

A fairly flat-topped loaf of bread recently extracted from the bread machine — new bread machine in action

Collection Management, or Digital Housekeeping

I’ve started working on organizing my ebooks recently after it was brought to my attention that Amazon would no longer allow people to download ebooks books they’ve purchased, except directly to a Kindle device or app as of February 26 (unfortunately I did not get this news to the people before that deadline; I only heard about it myself a few days beforehand. Then again, I am not a journalist or news outlet). Amazon can choose to be shitty about digital content people have bought, paid for, and theoretically own because of DRM, or “digital rights management,” which exists thanks to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) of 1998. Because of DRM, Amazon (or any digital bookseller) can dictate how you use and access your books, or even remove the books because content with DRM is really something you’ve leased, not something you own. Amazon even uses a proprietary file format (previously mobi and now AZW) for ebooks instead of the open epub format, which prevents users from reading their books on anything but a Kindle device or the Kindle app.

I stopped buying books from Amazon years ago and switched to Kobo, which is still not perfect but does a much better job than Amazon, and offers some DRM-free books. Still, I have a lot of Kindle books that I want to be able to read but don’t because they’re trapped in Amazon’s ecosystem. Unfortunately, I spent many years taking advantage of ebook sales so I have hundreds of books there. Kirk sent me this video explaining how to download your Kindle books and convert them using Calibre and this de-DRM plugin. I almost didn’t try it because I attempted to do this many years ago and it didn’t work and I got frustrated. However, I am better at using the computer and perhaps computer people are better at explaining how to do things now, so this time I was able to succeed. Here’s what I did:

Downloaded all my 500+ Kindle books. I can confirm that the option to download from the website is no longer available. I am guessing you could download books to a Kindle device then transfer them to a computer, but I don’t know that for sure. If anyone tests it and let’s me know, I’ll update the post!
While I was at it, downloaded all my Kobo books (here’s how).
- I had a hard time figuring out where the Kobo books downloaded to on my computer. This website explains where to find them.
- The Kobo books with DRM download as ASCM files that only open with Adobe Digital Editions. This program is free to download. You can open the ASCM files with it and convert them to epubs.
Set up de-DRM plugin (if you’re doing this, make sure to add your Kindle serial number per the directions, or it won’t work).
Added books by dragging them all in to Calibre (or you can use the Add books button). I dropped in my epubs (books that were natively epub and others that I converted from ASCM) and AZW format books.
Converted the non-epubs using the Convert books button. Ta-da. Now everything is a DRM-free epub and I can use it however I want!

This might sound like a lot of work for books that I already have access to but it’s the principle of the thing. If I buy a book, I should be able to read it however I want. I am also concerned that Amazon, in particular, might start being more aggressive in its censorship. Consider, for example, that Amazon’s owner Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, announced that he is now directing the paper’s opinion section to be “[writing] every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Yikes. How likely is he (or someone working for him) to decide that ebooks need to also be in “defense of personal liberties and free markets”? I don’t know, but the point is that he could do something to fuck up access to all the books you bought. Call me a radical libertarian if you must (just this once [but please don’t lol]), but I think you should own the stuff you buy!

Now that I have all my ebooks downloaded, converted, and in once place, I’ve been working on getting the metadata organized. You know I love organizing metadata (this is not sarcasm!). I’m like an autistic child happily stacking blocks over here except I am tagging my books consistently. This is very similar to what I did with my music collection two years ago and what I did with my flashcards last year (in fact this is ongoing. I get bursts of productivity then ignore it for weeks. It’s very hard to double check and tag literally thousands of vocabulary flashcards). I guess the books are this year’s digital housekeeping project. As with both of those previous projects, I do feel like this is something I should have been doing all along to keep my library organized, but unfortunately, I abdicated control of my digital possessions to a corporation. Much like streaming or storing information on the cloud, letting someone else manage my ebooks means that whoever is managing can make decisions that I don’t like. It means I’m stuck with some stupid app that is probably going to advertise at me even when I’m paying a subscription fee—it means I’m paying a fucking subscription fee to study flashcards! As I wrote about social media last month, “We trade our data and sanity and convenience.” That’s true here too. It does take a little more effort to manage my own media but I know it is mine and can’t disappear or have features randomly eliminated. Yes, all roads on this blog apparently lead to complaining that we have ceded too much control over many aspects of our lives to corporations. It keeps happening so I’m gonna keep talking about it as I try to claw my way out (and hopefully drag some of you with me).

Kitchen Witchery

Aside from the new bread machine adventures, I tried out this recipe for oatmeal cream pie bars. I do really love the Little Debbie oatmeal creme pies, so when I saw this recipe I was excited for a low-effort, homemade version. They are very good. My only disappointment is that I didn’t get my frosting all huge and fluffy like it is on the recipe website. Still, I’m not complaining.

a big, square cookie topped with marshmallow creme frosting and heart sprinkles — oatmeal cream pie bars

A cookie bar with white marshmallow creme frosting draped over it and topped with heart sprinkles — oatmeal cream pie bars

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Is Fritz the world’s most photogenic cat?

Fritz the cat standing on a platform behind the couch, looking down at the camera — POV: You’re not in the right position to cuddle

Fritz the cat sitting in a sliver of sunshine with his shadow dramatically being cast behind him — POV: You’re not in the right position to cuddle

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: February 16, 2025

Posted on February 16, 2025 by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. Let’s just get this out of the way: the shower drama is ongoing. Our contractor scheduled a plumber for Monday, but he was sick and couldn’t make it. Then I didn’t hear from the contractor all week and I was forced to email them to ask if this is the only plumber in the tri-state area or what. I’m told they are “in talks” with another plumber as if this is a Middle East peace summit. Anyway, our bathroom has been torn up for a month. Very fun and cool! In other homeownership drama—because these kinds of things tend to happen all at once—we had a totally different plumber come by this week to fix the sink in the bathroom that isn’t currently torn up because it had all but stopped draining. Fortunately that was a comparatively easy operation. Then, the spring on our garage door broke and we couldn’t get the door open. We actually keep our car in the garage, so you can understand how this could be a problem. We were able to get someone out the same day to fix it. We ended up spending quite a bit of money because we replaced the entire garage door mechanism; the repair guy pointed out that it probably only had a year or two of life left and we could visibly see the chain slackening in a significant and worrying way. I am complaining about this but I do still prefer it to living in an apartment. Hazards of the job, I guess. I would also rather replace something like the garage door opener now before the supply chain falls apart/tariffs make everything insanely expensive. Yes, this is what I’m thinking about during every transaction now.

Current Events

There’s still a lot happening and I’m assuming a lot will stay happening for the duration. I think one of the hardest things right now is not getting battered by the deluge of shit the government says it’s doing. Yes, it is tempting and seems briefly satisfying to dunk on something patently idiotic like Representative Carter (R-GA) proposing H.R. 1161 to “To authorize the President to enter into negotiations to acquire Greenland and to rename Greenland as ‘Red, White, and Blueland.'” It’s easy to look at this and be like, Republicans and everyone who supports them are stupid as fuck. However, as Sarah Kendzior often says, these people “cover crime with scandal.” The same day that Carter introduced this fucking nonsense, he also proposed H.R. 1160, which would make doctors and other medical professionals into independent contractors. This would destabilize an entire industry. We don’t need more precarity in our workforce, especially for a career that requires a lot of specialization and continued education, and that costs a lot of money to get into. Another example of stuff to not get bogged down in, in my opinion anyway, is Trump announcing he’s going to levy a 25% tariff on Mexico and Canada, only to walk back the tariff the next day. The same day, Elon Musk was getting access to the Treasury’s payment system. The tariffs are definitely harmful, but to me they seem like a way to bury the much more serious issue of known grifter Elon Musk tapping into the system the government uses to pay everyone. I will note, in fairness, that a judge told Elon to stop. But, as even The New York Times explains, “If the administration fails to comply with the emergency order, it is unclear how it might be enforced.” Yeah, I bet. The president is encouraging him or at least letting him do this so … who would stop him?

There are other pieces of news I want to point out but that I’m not getting deep into:

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) act is rearing its ugly head in congress. It would require Americans to present a birth certificate or passport to prove that they are eligible to vote. This is a problem because “the reality is that more than 140 million American citizens do not possess a passport and as many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse’s name do not have a birth certificate matching their legal name.” It would also be a problem for any transgender people who have changed their name but don’t have a matching passport. Sounds like a great way to disenfranchise millions of people who probably won’t vote for conservatives! I don’t know how likely this is to become the law but I don’t think we can assume anything good at this point. If you can, I highly recommend getting a passport or changing your name immediately. This also alarms me in the context of Project 2025’s stated goal of ending no-fault divorce. Seems bad!
Wired reports that “The United States government has been secretly amassing a ‘large amount’ of ‘sensitive and intimate information’ on its own citizens.” Long story short: the government thinks it’s okay to purchase sensitive data about us, as long as it’s not acquiring that data directly via surveillance. Cool loophole. What could possibly go wrong.

Wikipedia

Wikipedia recently got some good press that I thought was interesting. I’m not their PR department but I am doing my part to improve the people’s encyclopedia, so it feels nice to see people say that Wikipedia is a good thing, actually. A columnist on CNN called it “one of the most reliable places on the internet.” It’s one of the internet’s most popular website and the only one not owned by a corporation. It’s troubling that so much of our time online is mediated by giant companies that make money off our attention, but that’s an essay for another day. Wikipedia was also in the news for becoming recognized as a digital public good. This means that the Digital Public Goods Alliance, a “UN-endorsed initiative that facilitates the discovery and deployment of open-source technologies,” said that Wikipedia is doing a good job and sort of acting like a public utility (to make a broad analogy).

I mention this stuff in part because I like Wikipedia and think it’s cool but also because we are heading into an information apocalypse. AI and fascism and a lack of critical thinking and reading skills are making it really hard to access information and know what’s true. That’s why people like Elon Musk are fucking mad at Wikipedia—they can’t control the narrative. There’s a great, long, explanation of the right-wing “crusade against Wikipedia” on Molly White’s newsletter [citation needed] that is a worthwhile read if you’re interested in all the details of this fight. Ultimately, Musk is mad that even being the world’s richest jackass isn’t enough to make people say nice things about him on Wikipedia (talk about “citation needed”). I think a lot of conservatives also get mad when people do things that aren’t just for themselves. Breaking out of our culture’s cult of individualism is a major threat to power. Why edit Wikipedia? To help other people find information? What’s the profit motive? Oh, there isn’t one. You can’t buy off people who are in it for the love of the game. Unfortunately, Musk isn’t the type to just leave it alone after someone tells him no. The Wikimedia Foundation (the non-profit that oversees Wikipedia) is working on ways to protect editors and help maintain privacy, as 404 Media reports. I’m not very worried for myself personally since I’m not working on particularly charged topics, but this stuff is still troubling given the current environment. Part of me thinks I should do something to be more careful but I don’t know what that would be and it is super easy to figure out who I am in real life given that I’m constantly talking about my Wikipedia activities here on my blog under my real name. Access to information is important to me and I have no plans to stop what I’m doing, even as a Wikipedia editor without a tremendous amount of contributions (yet). I will be raging and writing about information literacy from the gulag if it comes to that.

Prison, honey

Speaking of the gulag, let’s check in on the fortunes of America’s private prison companies. Immediately after the election, stock prices for private prison company GEO Group jumped by 32 percent. Last week, Business Insider noted that stocks for GEO Group and Core Civic (another private prison company) are “tending” in response to the news that the “U.S. is building a massive facility to house up to 30,000 deported migrants” in Guantanamo. Forbes reports that “data from 2023 shows that some 90% of ICE detainees were being held at private institutions with an estimated 80% of those housed at CoreCivic and Geo Group facilities” and that both companies are ready to scoop up more government business if Trump deports as many people as he has promised to do.

Two pieces of prison-related news came out recently. First, Trump announced he is “sending nonviolent, ‘low-risk’ migrant detainees” the the facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which they are converting into a “large-scale immigration detention site.” People will be “held there until they can be deported.” What I don’t understand—and have yet to find an explanation for—is why they want to send people to Guantanamo. Is the point to cut them off from anyone who could help them? Put them to work (don’t make me bring up AP’s Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands article again)? Are they hoping we’ll forget if it’s offshore? Is the cruelty the point?

The second news item is that El Salavdor’s president Nayib Bukele (who, by the way, per Reuters, “labels himself as the ‘coolest dictator’ and a ‘philosopher king.'” These fucking people.) has offered to let the US jail people in El Salvador’s giant prison complex that can house 40,000 people. Bukele stated, “The fee would be relatively low for the US but significant for us, making our entire prison system sustainable.” I assume this is just another way to get in on those sweet prison profits. Even if you accept that prison is necessary, should companies be turning a profit from it? It’s also strange and troubling because it is unconstitutional to deport American citizens. I don’t know if that will stop them from doing it, but I hope it would at least slow them down. I do worry that this could become a way to remove dissidents. This may sound far-fetched at the moment but I don’t think it’s safe to assume it couldn’t happen (but we should all be raging to prevent such things from happening). President Bukele is definitely operating in the same style as Trump. El Salvador’s constitution used to say that presidents could only serve a second term after waiting ten years (seems like a great idea to me), but Bukele-appointed Supreme Court justices overturned this, paving the way for him to become president for a second consecutive term (I learned all about this from editing Wikipedia!). This is a case of dictators supporting dictators!

Books and Other Words

book: Notorious Sorcerer. Cover features the silhouette of a man in a red coat, holding a flame in his hand — Notorious Sorcerer

I really enjoyed Notorious Sorcerer by Davinia Evans. I accidentally bought the second book in this series when I was browsing my local bookshop and then had to double back and get the first book, Notorious Sorcerer, from the library. The story follows Siyon Velo who makes his living “delving” between dimensions to acquire alchemically charted materials, which he sells to local practitioners. He’s a member of the Bravi, which seems like a cross between a gang and a theater troupe (perhaps … this is all gangs?). Alchemy is technically illegal in Siyon’s city, but rich people practice it and, if you have money—which Siyon does not—you can learn it at the university. The author’s world is very rich and has a cool magic system, which the wealthy magic practitioners think they understand, but maybe not so well as they believe. I don’t want to spoil anything but I will say there are lots of good characters—including a rich twat consigning himself to another realm because he’s in love with a creature, pretty and useless men (per the author’s description! that’s not me)—card games that may or may not be inspired by forgotten magic, and at least one trip to the opera. I’m looking forward to the other books.

book cover for Let This Radicalize You shown on Kobo ereader — Let This Radicalize You

The title of Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba’s book Let This Radicalize You comes from one of the author’s frequent sayings: “Let this radicalize you rather than lead you to despair.” The book offers perspectives on organizing and activism and includes thoughts from experienced activists on various themes. I loved this book and I highlighted so much wisdom as I read (and I am resisting copying it all out here). It’s really important, especially now, to figure out what we can do to avoid despair and connect with others. Hayes and Kaba emphasize that the key to activism is caring about other people (and yourself!) and building relationships. Connecting with other people is how movements are built; just reminding people of “horrifying facts” does not change people’s minds (My number one pitfall: assuming people will change their mind with sufficient information. Alas). The authors explain that hope is something you do and that “taking action is a practice of hope.” If we want to transform the world, “the most important thing you can do … is act.” We have to fight for the world we want, in person. We don’t all have to do everything, but we all have to do something. One observation that really hit me hard was that reading the news and consuming information about politics feels like being engaged in a political practice, but it’s actually just a hobby. Scrolling twitter and getting upset about every new piece of shitty legislation or whatever Elon is doing is not the same as being politically engaged. As the authors put it, “Debating the latest headline protest is ‘no closer to engaging in politics than watching SportsCenter is to playing football.'” Ouch. It’s also a good reminder to not to listen to criticism from anyone who isn’t putting in the work. It made me think of a recent article from 404 Media called You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism and, yeah, you can’t. You have to do uncomfortable things, like deal with people whose views don’t perfectly align with our own. We have to do things and connect with people. Per Hayes and Kaba, “When people delve into activism, they often grapple with questions like, ‘Am I willing to get arrested,’ when often the more pressing question for a new activist is ‘Am I willing to listen, even when it’s hard?'” The also ask “how much discomfort is the world worth?” Oof! Finally, I must share this quote on reading and educating oneself: “We urge organizers to spend more time with books and other modes of learning, not as an admonition … but to encourage you to claim an inheritance of knowledge your oppressors hope you never discover, embrace, or build from.”

Meanwhile, on the internet:

WHY ARE THERE NO FUCKING JOBS? via The Life of a Femcel. It sounds like the job market is even worse than when I graduated into the recession in 2009. I feel for these young people. From the article, “My other main point is this: we are in such late stage capitalism that even the people, perhaps especially the people, who have done everything right by interning, getting a good degree from a top university, networked, worked hard, are screwed. The only way to get a job now is through a connection, and much of that is timing, luck, and class.”
On the recipe as object via From the Desk of Alicia Kennedy. A piece that asks “If recipes and cookbooks have historically been significant ways to understand people and places better, spanning geography and time, what does the digital glut and onslaught of recipes tell us about our current moment?”
How Can You Spot an Inaccurate Dinosaur? AO Wants to Know. via Atlas Obscura. This is an article about one man’s mission to illustrate the inaccuracies in dinosaur toys and show what they should look like, based on what we currently know. We love to see an autistic person (I can only assume) thriving.

Corporeal Form

Is anyone else just … feeling physically bad? I know it’s not just me because Culture Study had a whole piece a few days ago called Who Else Is Feeling This In Their Body and all the comments are like YES, ME TOO. I’ve been pretty tired and everything feels extra hard lately, even for things I want to do. I didn’t think I was sleeping that poorly since my brain never saves information about if I’m waking up at night, but a few nights ago I dreamed that I took an all-day nap. How exhausted do you have to be to need sleep in a dream? Also my knees are feeling bad, which includes my “good” knee doing something weird. I don’t know what but it doesn’t feel right and I’m a little scared to investigate. Let’s hope it’s just the weather. I cannot abide another ailment.

Doing Stuff

We had the second annual SOUPer Bowl two weeks ago. It seems like this was long enough ago that it should have been in my last post, but it just missed the cutoff. It was really great and everyone made good soup. Getting together with friends for a low-stakes food-based activity is actually amazing. I made Senegalese peanut soup from The Daily Soup Cookbook and it was well received. I can’t ask for more than that! I feel like there ought to be more to say about it, but what is there I can say about the joy of getting together with the gang and eating soup on a rainy day?

Five small cups of soup on a plate with crackers and bread — Souper bowl sampler

Several pots of soup on my stove and countertop — Souper bowl sampler

This weekend we saw the Sacramento Ballet do Romeo and Juliet and they had a live orchestra and everything! I like seeing these classic ballets in part because it’s fun to see the origin of songs I often hear in ballet class, like this one. I thought the choreography was very playful. I have no idea if that is typical for this ballet; they said they used new choreography (with the traditional Prokofiev score). I also thought it was interesting that the choreography seemed to reference the play’s dialogue, like when Romeo and Juliet first kiss, they do a bunch of moves with their hands touching and I thought that was a cool allusion to the line about letting lips do what hands do.

Kitchen Witchery

I haven’t gone too wild in the kitchen recently, continuing my trend of taking it easy. I made some good Indian food, all stuff I’ve made before: matar paneer (peas and cheese), lentils, and rice, plus some roasted cauliflower for good measure. I was very satisfied with this potato soup that I made a couple of nights ago. It’s a New York Times recipe so I will note that I added a little more seasoning, in case anyone is planning to try it.

a plate of matar paneer, rice, and roasted cauliflower and a bowl of garlic dal — peas and cheese and things

A big pot of creamy potato soup — peas and cheese and things

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. For anyone hoping for updates about Fritz’s poor litter box behavior: he is making progress. He started pooping in the bathtub instead of in places around the house, which we encouraged because that’s at least next to the litter box and maybe will make him feel better about being in the bathroom. He has been using the box more readily and even did so without anyone observing it! He normally thinks using the bathroom needs to be a family activity. Don’t let anyone tell you that cats are anti-social.

Fritz the cat inside his blanket den, looking out towards the camera — hidden baby

Fritz the cat curled up in shrimp mode on the bed, lifting his head to yawn real big — hidden baby

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: February 2, 2025

Posted on February 2, 2025 by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. I hope we are all staying as sane as possible in these wild times. I myself am feeling a little nuts but I’m hanging in there. I’m trying to stay offline and read my books and talk to my friends. I hope you are all doing the same.

I know a lot of people get to my posts through social media, but as we know social media is crumbling and a lot of people are not using it as much. So, I’d like to remind you that you can subscribe to my blog here. You’ll get every post in your inbox as an email. You can even reply to it and it will come straight to me!

Current Events

It hasn’t even been two weeks of Trump round two and everything feels insane. There’s a pervasive sense of unreality that I think is probably very similar to what people in the USSR felt. Rules are changing, it’s about to be very hard to buy anything (including food) thanks to these tariffs, and we have no idea what kind of kleptocratic bullshit the administration is going to do next. I was commenting to my friend that we were planning a trip to Costco before their teamsters went on strike (averted at the last minute, by the way) and I was like, wow, what a Soviet-ass statement. I fear that the era of getting everything we want when we want it is coming to an end. I’ve got two books on the top of my reading list to help me think about this topic: Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation and Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956. I’ll let you know what I learn.

I am trying to avoid the news, not completely but enough to keep me sane. I know we need to know what’s going on but I don’t think the palace intrigue and propaganda press announcements and minuta are going to help me. I spent Trump’s first term on Twitter non-stop and, in retrospect, that was not a great choice. Unfortunately, since I work as a federal contractor, a lot of news is coming directly. They are sending notices about the executive orders Trump is issuing and the resultant policy changes to my work email. They keep saying that these messages are “legitimate and can be trusted,” which … if you have to announce that about yourself, I think you know you’ve already lost. It’s a little scary and I’m hoping my program doesn’t get canceled. I’m just glad I’m not a full federal employee because then I’d be losing all my work towards my pension and benefits if I got laid off (as it is, I just have to hope the stock market doesn’t crash and take my 401(k) with it … -desperate laughter-). There are also much bigger problems beyond one small program that supports the Affordable Care Act, like the fact that Elon now has “access to sensitive Treasury data including Social Security and Medicare customer payment systems.” For all the bad stuff that is happening, this could be seriously terrible. This is all the government’s money. I’m sure there’s no connection, but Elon did spend $44 billion buying twitter, which came from a combination of personal funds, money from investors, Qatar, and a Saudi prince. Apparently, it’s not enough to be the richest guy in the world, he also has to make sure no one else has any money at all. I hope he drops dead.

Books and Other Words

book cover for The Crescent Moon Tearoom shown on kobo ereader — The Crescent Moon Tearoom

The Crescent Moon Tearoom by Stacy Sivinski is about three magical sisters—triplets, in fact—who run a tea house in late 19th century Chicago. The girls bake nice treats and read their customers’ tea leaves, making it a very popular stop for the ladies of Chicago. The story is about the tension of discovering yourself and what you want even if that’s not what you thought your life was going to be, which of course is heightened by having identical sisters who thought they would all be together all the time. The story is cute but it’s working overtime to be “cozy” to the point that it borders on saccharine. The prose didn’t really do it for me, either. The author fell back onto the same imagery a lot (so many references to the scent of marigold and the “candy-striped” circus tent, and feeling sensations all the way down to one’s toes) and, as an editor, I unfortunately notice these things. I do appreciate that there’s a circus in this book, though it’s not the main event. One of the sisters falls for a handsome performer whose personality seems to just be trapeze artist with “inky black curls” (his job is just trapeze). But I suppose who among us would be immune to an empty-headed and attractive trapeze performer who listens to our problems? So, while I love witches and circuses and often appreciate a tale of sisterly relationships, this book was just okay in my opinion.

This is a rare post featuring just one book. I’ve been reading a lot of Don Quijote, but it’s going to be a while before I finish it. I’m about three-quarters through a quite good fantasy book, but you’ll have to wait for next time to hear about it!

Meanwhile, on the internet:

what the fuck are we doing anymore via the late review. Thoughts on the state of social media and journalism and writing, and how things are now terrifying and making us all insane.
The Social Media Sea Change via Culture Study. More thoughts on social media but more practical with musings on how it feels to be on social media less.
Historians Politely Remind Nation To Check What’s Happened In Past Before Making Any Big Decisions via The Onion. This headline speaks for itself.
If you were rich, would you fold laundry? via Inner Workings. From the article, “An ideal is emerging for me, a triad of types of work: The work you do to get paid, the life maintenance tasks like laundry, and the creative things you do for you. The economy-oriented work, the basic needs work, and the soul work, each of which brings something different to a full life. Three legs that create a solid foundation. I think the benefits of the paid work and the creative work are more obvious, but I would argue the maintenance work also has benefits. The role of these tasks in this triad is to anchor me to the world. They remind me how life is sustained. They remind me to value such work at the level it should be valued.”

Now That’s What I Call Shower Drama vol. 8

Regular readers are well acquainted with our ongoing shower saga (original saga: 1, 2, 3. extended saga: 1, 2, 3, 4). Because apparently nothing can be easy, it continued this week. We were originally slated to start last Thursday—we signed a contract for the work in October but had been waiting for all the materials to arrive and then the holidays to end—but they had to push it back slightly and I was told they would tentatively start on Monday. On Sunday night, I texted the project manager to ask what was going on and he said he’d been furloughed and didn’t know. I kind of assumed the work would be further delayed since no one had confirmed with me, but in fact people showed up bright and early on Monday morning to rip out the shower. It was Wednesday before I got ahold of anyone at the construction company to find out what was going on. We have a new project manager who wanted to come over and “talk through” the project. I was very cross when he said he needed to check if they had all the materials and that the job started “earlier than [I] expected.” There’s a huge difference between that and people showing up without letting me know that they were for sure coming. I still am not certain when someone is next planning to come over and continue working on this shit, which means we’ve had a full week without using this bathroom because people can’t fucking communicate. Fortunately we have a second bathroom, but that’s where we keep the cat’s litter box so it’s not like I want to leave my toothbrush in there! I am having a bad time!

The space where my shower has been removed, exposing the inner walls, pipes, and insulation — here we go again

Doing Stuff

A shelf of bound periodicals with five volumes of "Lesbian Connection" — I went to the Lesbian Connection and everyone knew you

After the election, one of the things I wrote was “Pick one cause to put your effort into. There will be many things that need attention (I mean, there already are!) in the coming years. Pick one thing in your community that you want to support and volunteer for that.” I may have discovered my thing. Yesterday I went to volunteer orientation at the Lavender Library, Sacramento’s queer library and archive. It’s completely run by volunteers, and people can go there to read, check out books, or participate in community programs. I think it’s really cool and I don’t know why I didn’t think of doing this sooner. All the volunteers work the circulation desk to keep the library open, and there is the option of joining committees and doing other activities to keep the library going. I may finally put my masters in library and information science to use, some ten years later.

Big neon sign announcing the Crest theater with the marquee listing "Maria Bamford" — Maria Bamford at the Crest

Abby invited me to see comedian Maria Bamford with her. I went in knowing nothing about Bamford, just trusting Abby’s taste, and it was so hilarious. I mean, she opened with a bit where she rolls on the ground and says “I’m doing my job … I’m clocking in to work.” Yeah, that’s how it feels to work lately. I’m rolling on the ground. I am a worm. None of this makes sense but I’m here to put on my little show and get paid. It was good to just laugh for an hour and a half and be in a group where everyone is just as mad about how much everything sucks. Both Bamford and her opener hit us with a few comments about how much everything is insane and the crowd was like WOO YEAH. We’re all feeling it. We are not alone in this. So yeah, go out and laugh and be reminded that you are not an island.

Pump up the (Monster) Jam

me standing in front of a Scooby Doo-themed monster truck at Monster Jam — Monster Jam

A monster truck rally is probably one of the last places you’d expect to find me; yet, I went to one last weekend. My “niece” (biologically speaking: my friend Mandy’s kid. spiritually speaking: my niece) has been talking about monster trucks and how much she wants to see them for a while so we womaned up and took her to see Monster Jam! My niece had a great time but we were kind of bored by the whole thing. It’s just … big trucks? I don’t know. I’m not in the target demographic, I guess. I was surprised to notice that the primary audience is children, and probably autistic children, if I’m any judge of such things. The crowd mostly consisted of families with young kids. At the venue, they were selling ear protection in the form of headphones shaped like monster truck tires that light up, and little constellations of LED lights dotted the arena.

I found it fairly boring that the show was each car coming out, doing a trick, then ceding the floor to the next one. I was expecting a race, or perhaps a battle of some sort? It turns out the trucks do not fight. In between these stunts, there was a lot of commentary, which I found kind of grating. I felt like only one of the drivers, the woman piloting the shark-themed Megalodon, really understood the assignment. She seemed to get the cartoonish nature of the whole affair and really played up to the crowd. In contrast, the lady driving the Scooby Doo truck looked kind of dead behind the eyes. Lady, it’s a truck shaped like a dog and the tail wags. Get into it! Anyway, I’ve now seen for myself the kind of thing that could only be popular in America.

Nostalgia!!

In an effort to stay off the internet, I’ve been playing a lot of original Super Nintendo games over the last couple weeks. I signed up for Nintendo Online on the Switch (sidebar: why is everything a fucking subscription now? A rant for another day) so I could play old games. I actually still have my old Super Nintendo, but there’s no way to hook it up to a modern TV. I have been delighted to realize I still remember where all the secrets are in Super Mario 3. That shit is just in my brain for life. When I was a kid, there was a year when we got a subscription to Nintendo Power magazine and at the time they included a guidebook to Super Mario All-Stars (consisting of Mario games one through three plus Lost Levels) that showed the layout of each level and what was in it. I absolutely revered this book. “Cheating!” some might say. Well, we didn’t have YouTube back then so this was one of the few ways to really learn everything in the game. The other day I searched online to see if anyone had preserved it, and of course someone has! It’s in the Internet Archive. Thank you to whoever put this online for me to enjoy.

The Passamackey Mystery

I am encountering lots of new terms as I read Don Quijote and there are about a billion footnotes in the Spanish edition to explain the archaic usage of many words (I passed lucky footnote number 1,000 this week). Surprisingly, my friends reading in English are also finding some unfamiliar words. Lito brought up the word “passamackey,” which appears in the John Rutherford translation and apparently literally nowhere else on the internet, in our group chat. The text reads “… all the Turkish sailors and soldiers were convinced that they were going to be attacked there, and had their close and their passamackeys, or shoes, ready to flee over land without waiting for the assault.” We could tell from context that it’s a type of shoe but we had no idea where this word came from. I checked the Spanish version to see if we could figure it out, but the it wasn’t a whole lot more useful, it uses the word “pasamaques,” which suggests that the translator merely anglicized the word and called it a day. The Spanish version did have a helpful footnote explaining that passamaques are a type of sandal. I had to dig deep on the internet to get more information, but I eventually found a document called Notas etimológicas a “El ingenioso hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha”, dated 1899, in Wikisource (thank you Wikipedia). It explains that the term comes from the Turkish word بشامق‎ or baxámac, which is a type of sandal that “even Turkish emperors used.” Lito also confirmed with a Turkish friend that the modern word is paşmak, formerly written as başmak (Turkish during the Ottoman empire was written in the Arabic script, which does not have a p, so it would have been written with a b instead. This is why the word appears to change from başmak to paşmak), which means shoe, although the word originally referred to a palace, as that is where they were worn. This was hard-won knowledge so I am writing it down for the next poor soul who is trying to figure out where the hell this word came from. You’re welcome!

Kitchen Witchery

I’ve been cooking normal stuff and I’m still trying new tofu recipes. I revisited the orange tofu and broccoli, which I previously mentioned came out terribly, and used the Panda Express-branded orange sauce that they sell at the grocery store. This was a good choice. It tastes good and the result is a very easy meal, since you just roast the tofu and broccoli together in the oven then apply the sauce. On Friday night, I tried the kung pao tofu recipe from Bean by Bean and we loved it. I was pleasantly surprised by how good this recipe is. It’s a great time to find more tofu recipes to love considering the cost of groceries (laugh/cry)! Finally, it’s been cold, so I made stew and biscuits! I use the recipe from How to Cook Everything as a starting point, but I use the slow cooker and add some extra stuff for flavor like a packet of Lipton onion soup.

A bowl of stew, a big pot of stew, and biscuits cooling on a wire rack. All positioned near each other on the kitchen counter — stew and biscuits

A bowl of orange tofu and broccoli over rice next to a plate of gyoza — stew and biscuits

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Fritz has truly been serving lately.

Fritz the cat with his head sticking out from a sea of blankets. He looks faintly alarmed — Tucked in

Fritz the cat peeking his head between levels of the cat tree — Tucked in

How To

How to Find Books to Read

Posted on January 22, 2025 by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. Given the abysmal state of the internet, I’m writing a few posts about how to find information, starting with this one about how to find and access books. There are a lot of reasons to read books, and not just get lost in reading bits and pieces on the internet (although that has its place). I’m not going to make this into an essay on the importance of reading, but I will note that academics have noted that “higher levels of educational attainment appear to mitigate the tendency toward authoritarian preferences and attitudes” and that reading more “is a significant predictor of democratic citizenship.” Plus—this may be controversial—reading is fun! It gives us things to think about and to discuss with our friends. Telling stories is part of being human and reading can connect us with our cultural heritage. Or, as one author recently put it, “I think people who care about literature need to make this argument, relentlessly: that everybody deserves to have access to these stories, that they’re cool and good and fun, that not everything in the world needs to help advance you up the ladder, that there’s more to being alive than work and posting and gaining influence, that winning isn’t in fact everything.”

comic panel from "Persepolis." A woman is smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper. The caption reads "Once again, I arrived at my usual conclusion: One must educate oneself." — from Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis”

This post discusses what are two separate, but connected, concepts: discovering interesting things to read and figuring out how to access those things. I explain how I find out about books and provide information about where you can get the books, often for free.

Local Public Library

Of course I am starting by recommending your public library! It’s the easiest way to get free books and support access to books for your community. The majority of public libraries let you sign up online and you can get ebooks and e-audiobooks too. If you don’t know where your library is in the world or on the internet, get online and search “[city name] public library.” If you’re in California, you can also use this tool from the California State Library to find your local library.

If there’s a specific book you want but the library doesn’t have it, you can probably ask the library to buy it for you. Most public libraries let you request materials. It’s possible that they will deny your request (it has happened to me), but they are likely to grant it (this has also happened to me!). Here’s the Sacramento Public Library request form, for example. If you can’t figure out how to request materials, search the library website (not the catalog), or go talk to a librarian. I promise librarians want nothing more than to help people find out about things, so they will be happy to help you.

Beyond simply browsing for books, I subscribe to the Sacramento library’s new book alerts newsletter. I find out about new things and I know the library has them! It’s very convenient and I’m sure many libraries have a similar service.

screenshot of the kobo website's page for a book with the library extension displaying the book's availability at the Sacramento library

I have installed a web browser tool called Library Extension to easily find out if my library has a book available. After setting up the extension, it asks for your local library. Whenever you’re on a page about a book, the extension checks if your library has it and if it’s available. You can add multiple libraries, including the Internet Archive Open Library. It is a great reminder to use the library and it helps me spend less money on books!

Physical bookshops

Independent bookstores are also a great place to find books. The people there are usually very well informed and there are bookstores that specialize in certain genres or subjects, like The Ripped Bodice for romance books, Mysterious Galaxy for science fiction and fantasy, or Book Larder for cookbooks. Go walk around the bookstore and see what you find! If you don’t know if there are any independent bookstores near you, you can check the Indiebound bookstore finder or bookshop.org’s bookstore map.

Your local bookstore probably also has a newsletter that talks about new books and events. I subscribe to newsletters for a few bookstores, so I hear about a lot of new books that way.

Don’t forget about local used bookstores! Second-hand bookshops seem to have the wildest treasures and they are not as focused on stocking new releases as other bookstores.

Internet Libraries and eBooks

I love that the internet makes it possible to access so many cool things! There are online libraries available, with a wide variety of books and materials. If I’m buying ebooks online, I usually use kobo, but you do not have to buy books at all The public library has ebooks, and many free online libraries exist. Here are some of the big ones:

image of a frog on top of a stack of books with the text "reading for pleasure? Nope. I read for PAIN." — art by Frogwitch

Queer Liberation Library: You have to join to access the library but it is totally free. The site describes it’s collection as “Queer books! That’s it.”
Open Library by the Internet Archive. This is a huge collection that you can borrow from and read online. There are lots of out-of-print works, but plenty of modern stuff too.You have to make an account, but it’s free.
JSTOR is a site for academic works and they have a collection of over 13,000 open access books, which means they are freely available to everyone. I’ve been using JSTOR for a while because they let you access their scholarly articles even if you’re not connected to an academic institution as long as you make an account (you can read 100 per month!), but I only just learned they had such a big collection of books.
US Press E-books Collection is a repository of books published by the University of California Press. True sickos like me love this kind of stuff because I will get into any academic niche, but even non-sickos can perhaps enjoy becoming curious about works like this Egyptian novel translated into English or a cultural history of hysteria.
Open Culture: A selection of mostly classics that you can read online or in other ebook formats. Open Culture has a lot of media beyond books, too.
Project MUSE: Another repository of academic work. This one focuses on humanities and social sciences.
Open Research Library is a collection of over 14,000 open access books. The main page looks a little off-putting to me but I assure you there are real books here.
Directory of Open Access Books, more mostly academic reading. This might seem repetitive, but open-access academic work is important. A lot of these books can be difficult to find and very expensive, so the more repositories we have, the better.

Publisher Newsletters

Another way I find books to read is through publisher newsletters. Publishers want you to know about their books, so basically every publisher has some kind of service to let you know what is new. If you don’t want newsletters, most of them have social media of one form or another that you can follow too. If you aren’t sure who publishes the books you read, just check the cover page of a book and it will tell you, then you can look them up.

Here are some that I follow:

The University of Chicago Press has gives newsletter subscribers a free ebook every month!
I like science fiction so I subscribe to the newsletters for both Tor and Orbit Books.
Haymarket Books has a lot of great nonfiction on the state of the world and what to do about it. They often run sales and you can get ebooks for cheap. Sometimes they give ebooks away, like these books about Palestine.
I’ve recently started following AK Press. It has a similar vibe to Haymarket but with a slightly different focus.

Follow Authors Online

Authors are readers as much as they are writers. They often post about what they’re reading and what they liked. If I like a book, I look up the author on BlueSky or instagram (or whatever social media we’re using) and follow them. If I love an author, I’ll find their website (just search “[author name]” or “[author name] website”) and sign up for their newsletter. Basically every published author has a newsletter to at least announce new books. I find a lot to read from what authors are talking about online. Some authors, like Cory Doctorow or Mary Robinette Kowal go out of their way to share interviews and reviews, which is also a great source for finding interesting things to read.

Organizing Your Reading List

It is probably impossible to read all the books that I have saved in my TBR (to be read) list. My method of keeping my reading wishlist organized these days is to add things to my “to read” list on StoryGraph, which you can sort and filter. Sometimes I use it to browse books I’ve indicated that I own and want to read. It’s a good way to see what I already have, especially since many of my books are digital.

Talk to Your Friends

Even though reading is something you do by yourself, it doesn’t need to be something you do alone. I get tons of reading recommendations from my friends because they also like to read! We often joke in the group chat about the never-ending TBR. Talking about what you read with people you enjoy is one of life’s great pleasures! Ask your friends what they’ve been reading! Share your thoughts about the books you read! Sometimes we plan to read a book together and discuss it as we go, which is also very enjoyable. You can also follow your friends on social reading sites, like StoryGraph, to see what your friends are reading (here’s my profile!). I find out about a lot of books this way.

Coming Soon

I am hoping to make this into a series about using the internet and finding information today. I am thinking about writing about how to search and find things online, and how to avoid misinformation. I know plenty of people have covered these topics, but I hope I can add something to the conversation. If there’s something specific you want to see me explain, let me know!

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: January 19, 2025

Posted on January 19, 2025 by Lindsey

Hello, friends and enemies. Hey, so, everything is happening. 2025 really decided to start with a bang. I would love to believe that we’re getting the year’s madness out of the way and it is going to be smooth sailing from now to December. Unfortunately, Trump is being inaugurated for his second term on Monday so I have no illusions about what is to come.

L.A. Is on Fire

Two huge fires started in the Los Angeles metro after a windstorm snapped power lines. The fires are still burning. Cal Fire reports that the Palisades fire has burned almost 24,000 acres and is 39% contained; the Eaton fire in Alta Dena burned over 14,000 acres but is about two-thirds contained. That’s a tremendous amount of destruction and a huge health risk for everyone in the valley breathing that air.

Disasters are happening everywhere all the time but it feels much more emotionally close to home to see L.A. on fire. I grew up in southern California and I still live in the state so it is feels very real to see it on fire. A lot of people, Californians and non-Californians alike are emotionally attached to the area since we’ve been seeing it on TV our whole lives (one friend sent me a link about the status of the house they used for the Golden Girls being at risk, for example). It’s also very scary to see a disaster affect such a populated area and feel totally powerless about it. This tweet I included in the emergency kit post last week basically sums up the mood. L.A. is not that far away from me! And it’s very close to some of my family.

Tweet that reads "climate change will manifest as a series of disasters viewed through phones with footage that gets closer and closer to where you live until you're the one filming it" from user @PerthsireMags dated July 19, 2022

Aside from the global warming of it all, I remain concerned about housing issues. I feel like I’m repeating myself, but I will say again that we are operating in a climate where homelessness is criminalized and forced prison labor is legal. The Onion has already published an article titled LAPD Arrests Everyone Who Lost Home In Fire, so I’m far from the only one thinking about this. We already have a housing crisis in this state and a bunch of working-class people’s homes just burned down. Seems like that could end badly! Where will all those people go? Will the replacement houses be affordable? Landlords are already price gouging. It’s despicable behavior. If your reaction to a natural disaster is to immediately raise rents, you should not be allowed to be a landlord ever again and should probably get in line for the guillotine.

I hope that the state finds the political will after this disaster to raise wages for incarcerated fire fighters and make it possible for them to get firefighting jobs upon release. If the state government can’t figure it out now, when there’s more good feelings for firefighters than ever, then we’re never going to get it. Even Kim Kardashian wants them to get paid more. If this fire had come before the election, maybe the subject would have gotten enough people to vote for ending involuntary servitude as a punishment for a crime.

If you’ve been here for a while, you know it’s hard for me to do nothing when things are bothering me. Last weekend I wrote this emergency kit post about how to be ready to go if something terrible happens. I hope I never need it but I feel better knowing I’m reasonably prepared to deal with a disaster. I’ve also seen a lot of ways to donate to people affected by the fires. A number of people have already aggregated a lot of GoFundMe campaigns and other ways to directly support people because it takes a long time to get insurance and FEMA money. Here are some ways you can send money to people who need it right now.

Directory of GoFundMes for displaced Black families, displaced Latine families, displaced Filipino families, and displaced disabled people.
The Anti-Recidivism Coalition is running a campaign to give money to incarcerated fire crews.
Pasadena Humane Society, which has taken in lots of animals displaced from the fire in Alta Dena, is taking donations.
The Open Air Worker Emergency Fund is offering one-time cash assistance to outdoor workers impacted by the fires.
A big list of fundraising campaigns and ways to help in the Culture Study newsletter. People have shared a lot in the comments too.

For anyone affected by the fires, I am not the best source but I wanted to share a couple of things I’ve seen:

Mutual Aid L.A. resource list organized by date and location. There are lots of clothing drives and other distribution events.
The LA Times published a big list of places giving out free or discounted goods and services to anyone displaced by the fires.

Just about all these campaigns and resources are mutual aid. This is us being here for our fellow citizens. The government is not prepared to help at the scale and speed that is needed (I saw on instagram that the city of LA was asking a mutual aid group for masks. What? Doesn’t the city have money for this shit?). Consider this yet another reminder that we all have to take care of each other. Donating even five dollars to someone who needs it can help. We can’t all do everything for everyone, but if we all do something for someone, we’re going to get through this.

Social Media Apocalypse

Meta and TikTok have both been serving as sources of concern and insanity.

Moderation is Over

Facebook declared this week that content moderation is over, offering us more evidence that we cannot rely on tech companies to mediate our human relationships. If you missed it, Zuckerberg said Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) said it will replace fact checking with “a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes.” The platform will no longer be moderating hate speech, which includes “removing rules that forbid insults about a person’s appearance based on race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease.” This means that the internet experience is about to get really ugly for anyone other than heterosexual, able-bodied, cisgender white men. A former Meta employee said that they “really think this is a precursor for genocide.” This is not hyperbole given that facebook has played a role in fanning genocidal flames before. Some experts are saying that Meta is basically repeating the behavior that led to the genocide against the Rohingya people in Myanmar, and “laying the narrative ground work for … mass deportations” here in the US.

We really have to stop using services that are taking advantage of us and making the world worse on purpose. I thought for sure I had written about this in detail before but the closest posts I had were about not using Spotify anymore and some information about internet privacy when the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade. Facebook is a shambolic mess of a platform that is forcing AI slop into our feeds and keeping our friends from seeing our posts. I’ve been trying to organize events through facebook recently and many people told me that facebook didn’t even show them the event that they were explicitly invited to. It’s not even doing the thing it was ostensibly built to do.

I know the concept of not using facebook or instagram is daunting and scary. What if my friends never talk to me again? I get it! I quick facebook in 2014 and stayed away for a year or two until roller derby dragged my ass back into the ecosystem. However, using social media is not a sustainable way to live or connect with others. We trade our data and sanity and convenience. It’s so easy to see a funny video and send it to my friends and when they say “haha so true,” we are strengthening our friendship. We also didn’t have to make any effort and, it turns out, relationships take energy, even if they’re with our most favorite people. Effort is at a premium because it is so difficult to live. We’re all working a ton and managing our households and trying to clean and cook and exercise and go to the dentist every six months. No one was meant to do all this alone (or even with just one other person). Our social lives are what we end up sacrificing. Facebook and instagram and tiktok are here to sweep up the little pieces of socialization we can fit into the day.

I have a few suggestions for how to reduce our dependence on Meta and other social media. I think the hardest thing to replace is groups. We used to have forums! Anyone could start a website and put a forum in it. Then Reddit and facebook replaced them all. I don’t know how to replace the local Buy Nothing group that operates through facebook or the Rancho Gordo Bean Club group. That’s okay. I don’t have to know everything, but I do know that spending less time on social media and finding real ways to interact with your people is a net good. Any time we spend outside of the Meta (or Twitter or whatever) ecosystem is time that belongs to ourselves.

Here are some suggestions for connecting with friends and family without a technocratic middleman. I know they require more work than giving a heart to a post, but the upside is you will get to have a real conversation instead of feeling like you’re posting into an empty void. Call me a diva, but I would rather have a conversation with three people than get 50 likes on my post.

Text or instant messaging: I am surely dating myself, but remember hanging out on AIM, MSN messenger, or ICQ and chatting with your friends? Wasn’t that great? Good news, this technology is still available and you can talk to your friends all the time (and I do!). Get phone numbers and use your phone’s text message or use a dedicated, encrypted messaging app like Signal. I enjoy Signal because the things I say don’t get turned into ads!
Letters or email: Yes, I am basically just suggesting long text messages (lol). Honestly, even sending birthday cards or holiday cards is a good way to stay in touch. I realized this year that I could send holiday cards just to tell people I’m glad they’re my friends. That was always allowed! If managing your address book feels too hard, you can use Postable to get your friends’ addresses and send cards. Though, in my experience, if you just ask a friend for their address and tell them you want to send them something, no one will be mad. In fact, they’re going to be happy that you want to send them something!
Federated social media is supposed to be an antidote to corporate sites like facebook. I’m not an expert on this, but the idea is that you can leave a social media site and take all your connections and history with you, even if your friends don’t leave. This might sound crazy after 15+ years of facebook use, but it is possible using the magic of computers. Cory Doctorow has two posts that explain the concept well, one using the metaphor of a fire escape and another that talks about the benefits of federation more broadly. So far, the only federated social media spaces I know about are Pixelfed, an instagram replacement, and Mastadon.
Make real-world plans with your friends. Again, I know this is very hard because we are all busy. But this is the “community” they’re talking about when they say “you need to build community.” Your friends are your community! One of the best things to do is have a standing activity. You know I get tired fast, so I, personally, would not commit to anything weekly, but I love this article on having a weekly spaghetti night with whoever wants to show up. I have been hosting quarterly food parties with my friend (Souper Bowl II is coming up!). I have another friend who comes over for dinner every other week. Facebook can’t and shouldn’t attempt to replace this shit! Make plans to get ice cream when a new flavor comes out at your favorite shop! Go see every new Keanu Reeves movie! I don’t know! There are literally no rules and life is supposed to be fun.
Start your own blog or website. I am definitely biased because I’m running my own blog on a website that I own(!) and I think this is a great way to put thoughts into the world. I recognize that not everyone has the interest or technical knowledge to do all that. However, there are some easy options to set up your own blog or site. First, you can make a WordPress blog for free (WordPress is the system I use for my blog). Second, you can make a free website on neocities. Fellow internet natives probably remember GeoCities; neocities is using the same concept in an attempt to revive the internet and make it fun and interesting instead of a group of five websites containing screenshots of the other four.

screenshot of a tweet that reads "I'm old enough to remember when the internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four" from user @tveastman dated December 3, 2018.

Sign up for newsletters. This one isn’t really a “family and friends” suggestion, but any artist, author, academic, local shop, etc. you follow on social media almost certainly has a newsletter and they are probably exhausted with trying to appease the algorithm. You can subscribe to their newsletters to keep up with them! Shameless reminder: you can subscribe to this blog and get it delivered to your email! Here’s the subscription page.

Just in case it needs to be said: I am also not perfect at any of this. It’s so much easier to use social media but I do think it isn’t helping us as much as we think. I say that as a low-energy being who really loves the internet and probably wouldn’t have nearly as many or as good friends as I do without it. I think it’s important that we are continuously interrogating how we use this technology that didn’t exist 20 years ago (I know facebook literally existed 20 years ago but the way it is now is unrecognizable from, say, 2004 facebook). We don’t have to be perfect, we just have to put some effort in the right direction.

The Propaganda Isn’t Working Like It Used To

TikTok, the preferred social media app of young people and people with ADHD (I assume. All those short videos have to be doing something for my neurodivergent comrades but I find them overwhelming), is being shut down in the U.S. as of today. I have not been following this story very closely because I don’t use TikTok, yet I do find it troubling that our government would rather ban a company from doing business here instead of pass actual regulations that would protect our data online. If TikTok is letting China access our data, why don’t we make it harder for any corporation to take our data? Ah, but then we have to regulate the Silicon Valley companies and they make too many campaign contributions.

Multiple people have argued that the real reason the US wants to ban TikTok is “because it has become a hub for progressive activism” In User Mag, Taylor Lorenz relays the findings from a study that found “TikTok is the only platform where left-leaning news influencers outnumber right-leaning ones. TikTok also has more than double the concentration of news content creators who identify as LGBTQ+ or advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, and 73% of teens who identify as Democrats or lean left use TikTok, compared to 52% of teens who identify as Republican.” I think TikTok has shown people in the US a lot of information about other places that we wouldn’t have seen, or that would have been filtered through a different perspective. Through social media, and TikTok specifically, a lot of us heard directly from Palestinians, something we probably would not have been able to do otherwise. I’m sure this played a big part in motivating the student protests last spring, which seemed to really freak out our institutions and people in power.

There also seems to be a very real argument to be made that TikTok is being banned because Meta can’t compete with it (but … the free market! [sarcasm]) and has been spending tons of money to lobby against it. We know that Zuckerberg buys companies he can’t compete with or builds a copycat in the Meta ecosystem when he can’t. That’s why it’s so deeply hilarious that “In only two days, more than 700,000 new users joined Xiaohongshu,” or Red Note, in English, which is kind of like a Chinese version of Instagram. The app is in Mandarin. It’s for Chinese people. TikTok users’ reactions can basically be summed up as:

There’s no telling if this will last, but the memes, for now, are extremely funny (lots of “My Chinese spy is here! I thought I’d lost you!”). People are apparently attempting to learn at least a little Mandarin to use the app, if Duolingo is any indication. This also seems to be the first time that Chinese people and Americans have been able to directly talk to each other en masse and we seem to be discovering that we’re not so different after all. Chinese people are asking questions like “is it true that Americans have to work two jobs, or is that just propaganda?” I appreciate that Chinese people, unlike many Americans, understand that they are subject to a lot of government propaganda, but unfortunately, we’re not beating the “need two jobs to live” allegations.

As funny as this all is, I am concerned that, especially for younger users, that they may not just be ironically embracing China. I get that the US is doing some terrible stuff and China and the US have an adversarial relationship. However, opposing the US doesn’t automatically make China good. I think individual people from our respective countries interacting is a straightforward good thing. China as a country though is actively committing genocide against the Uyghur people. The government is anti-LGBT (I also read a bit about this topic a few years ago in Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China). And have people already forgotten about the protests in Hong Kong? I am far from an expert on China and I know the US is not doing much better on human rights issues (we, too, are bankrolling a genocide, backsliding on LGBTQ rights, and squashing protest). I know we all love to be online, but I hope everyone can temper their China enthusiasm with a little reality. Although for now, we can at least enjoy the memes and envy their functioning rail system.

Books and Other Words

Book cover for La nostalgia de la Mujer Anfibio shown on Kobo ereader — La nostalgia de la Mujer Anfibio

I am feeling good about having already read a whole book in Spanish this year (although I admittedly started it in December)! La nostalgia de la Mujer Anfibio by Cristina Sánchez-Andrade starts with a shipwreck on the shores of the Island in Sálvora off of Spain’s western coast the morning of Lucha’s wedding. Lucha does not want to get married and hooks up with one of the shipwrecked men, but goes on with the wedding anyway (wild choice!). The story goes on to narrate Lucha’s lack of connection to her daughter, who later moves to England, and the stronger connection she forges with her granddaughter, whom her daughter delivers to Lucha shortly before passing away. It’s still a little hard for me to get all the finer points of a novel in Spanish but I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to keep track of the plot a lot better than I have with books in the past. Perhaps I am learning something! The gist of the story is that all these old people in this small town are simmering with old grudges and secrets and it seems to be making them all miserable. Lucha’s daughter left because she was a lesbian (huge, open secret), Lucha’s husband always knew that their daughter wasn’t biologically his (big secret), and Lucha’s letters from her “shipwrecked lover” are forgeries (secrets and betrayal!). Things start to change when a hippy calling himself Ziggy Stardust comes to town and starts playing records for everyone in the town square to jog their memories. Cheers to the power of gay men bearing pop music?

book cover for Beans: A History shown on Kobo ereader — Beans: A History

I was unfortunately disappointed by Beans: A History by Ken Albala. You may think that a history of beans would be inherently boring, but no, I am interested in beans. I think this book should actually be called Beans: A Western Cultural History. It is organized into chapters about different types of beans, but nearly every chapter is stuck on the same thesis that beans in western culture have traditionally been a low-status food that people eschew when they can afford something better. Every chapter also came back around to any given bean’s usage in Europe or the US. Even the chapter on Phaseolus vulgaris, beans that originated in the Americas, mostly talks about Europe. We get a few pages about beans originating somewhere then we’re back to white people. Truly maddening. The closest this book gets to focusing on somewhere else is the chapter on soy, but even that does eventually migrate to what we’re doing with it in the west. I was interested in the parts that were about the history of a bean but how can there be a whole book about beans that glosses over so many parts of the world?

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Scoop: Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ Wikipedia editors via Forward. Great, I can’t wait to get targeted for editing Wikipedia. I love (sarcasm again) the dichotomy of “Wikipedia is unreliable!” versus “People editing Wikipedia are actively harming us and should be targeted.” So stupid.
The Year I Embraced the Potluck via Eater. 2024 was also the year I embraced the potluck and I loved it. I can’t wait for Souper Bowl II.
Third Space? You Can’t Handle a Third Space. via Midwesthetic. Everyone says they want a third space (a community place that is not work or home), but people are unwilling to deal with the inherent discomfort of being in public. Community is necessary but not always easy.
2024 Word of the Year Is “Rawdog” via the American Dialect Society. I remain out here, rawdogging life.
Threads of resistance: Knitting and embroidery are laden with stereotypes of domestic femininity – and the subversive potential for protest via Aeon. Fiber arts are art and they are cool and important.

Languages

I know I said I planned to read more in Spanish this year, and I am, but I did not plan to read Don Quijote in the original Spanish. Yet, here I am. My dear friend Lito wanted to read it this year and I decided to come along for the ride and the discussion (which, by the way, has been so much fun, even though I’m very behind on the reading). Since I can’t be normal about anything, I’m reading in Spanish. It is challenging but also not quite as terrible as I expected. I also didn’t expect it to be as funny as it is. I guess these classic works have staying power for a reason. It is definitely going to take me months to get through this, but I wanted to get it on the record that this is happening, as insane as that is.

Kitchen Witchery

I tried a baked oatmeal recipe because I eat oatmeal for breakfast but sometimes struggle to find the motivation to make a bowl of oatmeal every morning. This photo doesn’t look like much, but I was happy with how it turned out. I skipped the prescribed fruit and just did nuts on top, plus mixed in some flax meal. I had a version of this I was making with steel-cut oats but I realized that I don’t think those oats are doing my apparently extremely sensitive guts any favors.

A square ceramic pan of baked oatmeal topped with walnuts — baked oatmeal topped with walnuts

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. I remain obsessed with this creature.

Fritz the cat lounging in the lower level of his cat tree. His leg is hanging all the way out and his tail is dropping down — Big lounging

Fritz the cat on the windowsill with all his paws and his tail tucked underneath him. He's shaped a little like a butternut squash. — Big lounging

How To

The Emergency Kit Post

Posted on January 12, 2025 by Lindsey

In Monica Byrne’s novel The Actual Star, a novel partially set in a post-apocalyptic future where humans have made serious modifications to their bodies and culture to survive, she uses the term “Age of Emergency” to refer to the period “when unchecked capitalism led to an unprecedented spike in accumulations of capital, wealth, populations, and computing power worldwide, resulting in mass extinction, catastrophic climate change, and human displacement on a global scale.” I keep coming back to this term because it seems to be such an apt description of the current poly-crisis. All science fiction is commentary on the present, and Byrne intentionally described the our era a time of emergency. We’re in it. We see disaster every week. At the moment, half of Los Angeles is on fire and the south-eastern US is frozen. I can’t do anything about that, but it does make me feel better to think about being prepared for an emergency and to help my friends with the same.

Unfortunately, we are all of us stuck with the task of surviving our negligent (at best) institutions while the world burns. One thing that helps me feel less anxious is being prepared for disaster. Obviously, I’m not talking about building a bunker, but just having some essentials ready to go in case there’s a fire, flood, earthquake, a cyber-terrorism event that knocks out the power grid, or you know, other unforeseen horror.

By popular demand (at least two people said they would use this information), I am making a list of what’s in my emergency kit and what I am planning to add to my kit. My kit isn’t fully assembled, so this is half stuff I have and half stuff I still need. I like sifting through this kind of information, but it does take time and mental energy that not everyone has, especially for people who don’t respond to potential crisis by wanting to read more.

A few of my assumptions into this are that no one is using a kit to survive long-term in the woods or whatever. I assume we are in community in some way and not doing everything totally alone, even if it means you’re in an evacuation shelter or somewhere non-ideal. However, emergencies can isolate us so we need to be able to survive for a short while until we can rejoin others. I also don’t think you need to go drop $1000 and buy everything new and right now. Spread out the purchases over time—better to have something than nothing (again, survival is going to be collaborative). Check out your local second-hand sources or buy-nothing group to see if there’s anything you can use. I am putting together a kit for me and Kirk as well as my close friend Mandy and her young daughter who live close to us. So some of the links in the list are multi-packs for the whole fam. You can adjust for your situation and buy individual things or help your chosen family build their kits!

Sources

I used the following guides for inspiration because I’m not an expert. I just like looking things up and organizing them (and writing these things helps me too). You could refer to these and figure out your own kit if you like! I am including links for the specific stuff I have or intend to acquire to make it easier for anyone who doesn’t have the time or energy for all that.

The Best Emergency Preparedness Supplies via Wirecutter. They do update this list so just note things might change.
Get yourself a go bag via Margaret Killjoy.
Build a kit via Ready.gov.
Emergency pet evaluation pack via Autodesk instructables.

Go Bag versus Emergency Kit

It’s probably helpful to distinguish between a go bag and an emergency kit. Most of the survival-type stuff and basics in the following list are things I keep in a backpack that I could grab on my way out the door if I had zero notice and had to leave now. The rest of the stuff is what I think of as an extended emergency kit. It’s what you’d grab if you had 15 minutes to get out of the house. For me, this would of course involve the go bags and collecting my cat. I would get my purse, laptop and phone, box of important documents, medication, and probably my CPAP because I need that to live. We have a box of camping stuff in our garage so that would also go into the car along with any water container (I have been meaning to get one to put in the garage). If you don’t have a garage, you could keep everything together in a closet. Personally, because I am fat, I would also throw as many clothes as possible into a suitcase because I do not imagine any clothes getting donated in an emergency response are things I would be able to wear. Maybe that’s just anxiety but I have lived as a fat person long enough to know it’s not always easy to find something to wear! I’m not saying I need to be fashionable in an emergency.

I will add here that I’m not really writing about food to add to an emergency kit because I know I will not rotate it regularly. I treat my pantry as emergency food supplies. I know I have enough beans and rice and flour and cooking oil to get through a few days of crisis (at least). I’m not putting weird dehydrated food in my garage about it. Keeping your pantry stocked with ramen packets also counts as emergency preparedness. The important thing is you have a little extra food of whatever you actually eat on hand.

The Stuff

Here is stuff I have bought or plan to buy for my kit. None of these are affiliate links. There are some Amazon links because it’s unfortunately the easiest place to buy random shit like this also people act like their gift cards are cash so I had some store credit. You should get things from whatever is most accesible for you.

Basics

A bag to put things in. You do not need a fancy backpack but I bought backpacks in bright orange that hang just inside our garage so we could theoretically grab them on the way to the car. I checked a few sites to see what bags they have on sale. Here’s a yellow backpack from Columbia on sale right now. I’ve noticed bright-orange and yellow bags are often on sale. They are not necessarily fashionable but they will be easy to spot! You could alternately get a big box to put things in, but I prefer the idea of having everything in a portable bag in case we have to walk.
Safety whistle. presumably so you don’t have to scream to be found if it comes to that.
Glasses, I keep a pair of old glasses and sunglasses in my emergency kit (because the last thing I want is to be fucking blind when everything is on fire) and lens wipes or cleaning cloth. I use the little wet wipe lens cleaners because I have issues with my glasses getting scratched up otherwise. I used to use these little cloths that bundle up into a pouch.
Tampons, pads, menstrual cup, or whatever you use to manage your period.
Respirator so you can breathe when there is a fire. We have the 3M 6502QL masks, currently on sale for $24 at the link.
KN95 masks in case you have to shelter with others in an ongoing pandemic. They are also better than nothing if you don’t have a respirator. We buy these in bulk since we mask in public.
Hand sanitizer, any kind is fine.
A first aid kit that includes any over-the-counter medications that are important for you. I am going to include some voltaren gel for artritis into mine because I am effectively an old woman. My stomach is always fucked up so I’m also going to make sure I have pepto bismol and emesis bags.
Water bottles. I put old Nalgene bottles in our go bags and bought a Life Straw for each. The life straw is a water filter that you can insert to the bottle and screw in with a lid. Any water you already have will work for your kit and you can compatible Life Straws for most types. Another lightweight water bottle, if you need a suggestion, is Sigg. I have some that I don’t use anymore so that is another kit option for me.
Compact microfiber towel. I have the regular full-sized towel and washcloth sizes for everyone. You can probably find them on sale if you look around. These are also nice to take if you’re traveling (and following the guidance of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).
Emergency crank weather radio, so you can get updates if everything else is down. You only need one of these for your group, so coordinate with your friends or family.
Leatherman skeletool RX. These are a little expensive, but it’s seven tools in one tiny package, so it’s handy for any situations you may find yourself in. This is another item that I assume would be shared among your group.
Solar lantern. We have this inflatable solar lantern. I haven’t actually used it yet, but it seems like a light-weight way to keep a source of illumination handy.
Fresnel lens to use the sun for lighting a fire (it’s basically a magnifying glass).
Weird military can opener, and a video on how to use said can opener (I had to look it up).
Emergency blankets. This is a four-back of “huge” blankets, which seems like a nice idea to me because it sounds miserable not to have enough emergency blanket to wrap around my fat bod if it comes to that.
Headlamp or flashlight. I’m a big fan of headlamps, and I actually have one I use around the house when light is needed. The headlamp in the link looks good because it won’t turn on by accident in your bag and you can recharge it or use AAA batteries.
Rain poncho. Some people recommend converting a plastic bag into a poncho if you need one. Sure, this is an option, but if it’s flooding and raining like crazy, I’d rather spend the extra five dollars and not wear a trash bag. I don’t know what kind we have because we bought them on one of our many ill-fated rainy camping trips, but you can get the super cheap disposable ones here. If a rain-based crisis is likely in your area, it might be worth having a slightly nicer poncho.
Hygiene stuff: Travel toothbrush (like this or this), toothpaste tablets (I like these from Lush but I am bougie) or travel toothpaste, hair ties, ear plugs, soap strips, chapstick, nail clippers, floss, deodorant, sunscreen, tiny hair brush (this one folds and has a little mirror), dry shampoo, wet wipes, qtips, and whatever you need to not feel disgusting.
An extra copy of your house key. I haven’t done this yet, but I think keeping an extra key is a good idea in case you need to leave in a hurry and can’t find your keys.
A change of clothes. I’ve got a tank top, not-my-favorite-but-still-good socks and underwear, and these pants from Alder apparel that are for hiking and camping or whatever. They are good pants, I just don’t wear them that often so they’re in the bag.
Cash money. Remember when all the computers broke that one weekend? Keep a little cash handy just in case.

Miscellaneous Handy Items

What is handy to you may depend a lot on where you are and what disasters are likely, plus what is important for your health and comfort, but here are some general ideas:

Multi-charger cable. Charge multiple things on one USB cable.
Insect repellent because I will go insane if I have to be in a disaster AND get mosquito bites.
Sunscreen. Again, if I have to be horrifically sunburned in a crisis, I will fucking lose it. SPF 50 is recommended.
Portable power station. This is effectively a giant battery because I can’t sleep without my CPAP. I bought it after the last time the power was out all night and I stayed awake until it came back on at 5 am. It’s definitely too big for the go bag, but it is something I would want if I was loading up my car.
Portable CPAP. This is highly specific to me and expensive. I have been meaning to buy one of these mini CPAPs for travel or emergency situations. You should get whatever you need for your circumstances.
Mess kit. I bought one of these Light My Fire mess kits years ago to use when traveling and I’ve found them to be extremely handy! This is also a reminder that your emergency stuff doesn’t have to only be for emergencies. I’ve taken this with me to RollerCon, for example. If you don’t want the whole kit, it might be useful to at least have your own spork.
Duct tape. She does it all!
Paracord in case you need to tie or hang something. Black and neon yellow are the cheapest as of this writing.
Carabiner, probably useful for something. Why would you not want to have a carabiner?
Matches in a waterproof container. You could also get some kind of flint or other fire starter but, realistically, it’s matches for me.
Sun hat. I am thinking of getting one of these or something like it so the sun doesn’t destroy my delicate constitution. Depending on where you live, a storm hat might be a better choice.
A mini sewing kit, available in basic or slightly fancy.
Compass and local maps. You might need to navigate to an emergency shelter without Google maps. The Thomas Maps are probably too cumbersome to keep in a backpack, but are good to keep in the car. You could also get a smaller local map to keep in your go bag.
Heavy-duty trash bags.
Pen and a small notepad.

Pets

I only know about cats. If you have a dog or other pet, adjust accordingly. People with dogs are probably more used to taking their dog places and may not need all this advice.

Pet water bottle. This seems so useful. Instead of needing a water bowl and having to put water back in the bottle after, you can release a little water into the connected dish for your pet to drink from! Navy blue is currently the cheapest color.
Collapsible bowls for food.
Cat harness, which is probably worth trying to get the cat used to before any crisis, but I haven’t tried it with Fritz at all. I used to put it on Huey and let her flop in the sun on the back patio.
I don’t have a dedicated cat carrier in the kit, but I know where mine is and I leave it out in the house all the time so Fritz doesn’t think it’s something that only shows up when it’s time to do something scary. Sometimes he hangs out in there. I know this may be harder to do if you live in a small space.
Any favorite, small toys and treats are good to add to the kit too.

Documents

I’m planning to scan (but you could also take a phone photo) all my important documents and add them to my laptop, which I would presumably grab in an emergency, and to an encrypted USB drive. Here are instructions for encrypting a USB drive: https://nordvpn.com/blog/how-to-encrypt-flash-drive/

Have copies of:

Passport
Drivers license
Immunization (you and your pets)
Pet license or chip info
Car, house, or health insurance info
Prescriptions for medication, glasses, etc.
Deeds to your car, house, etc.
Bank account information
If you use a password safe program, a copy of your passwords

Additionally, it’s good to have a list of contact numbers for your home/renters insurance, doctor, health insurance, and vet. You could put that in a list on your phone or simply add them to your contacts. You also want to have contact information available for a friend or family member outside of your area so you can let them know your status or get help. We can either bring back memorizing phone numbers, keep your contacts on your drive, or make a list and keep it in a plastic pouch in your bag.

I’ve also made a list on my phone of everything in my go bag so I know what’s in there and don’t have to guess.

Sanity

I get the impression that a lot of time during a crisis is spent waiting around and being anxious. It is not frivolous to pack a few things to help you de-stress and relax. Everyone will have their own ideas about what to pack for entertainment, but here are some ideas that I quite like:

A paper book, probably something you already know you like like and don’t mind re-reading, maybe even something that would be fun to read aloud.
If you still have one, an old MP3 player or iPod and some wired headphones. They do still make MP3 players, but you could also probably pick up an iPod for cheap on ebay, or even load up an old cell phone with music to listen to offline (and if you don’t have any MP3 music anymore and would like some, please talk to me privately!).
I saw a suggestion for these handheld retro game emulators (basically a modern gameboy that has all the games built in) and am now obsessed with it and want one. Kirk says we would of course take the Nintendo Switch in an emergency, but what if we both want to play games at the same time? What if I just want video games in my purse?
A deck of cards, or Uno cards, or any small games you enjoy. You could throw in a travel Scrabble or whatever is going to keep you entertained.

You Made it to the End

This is an ongoing process for me. My emergency kit isn’t “done” but going through this list has helped me take stock of what I have and what I still need. It’s weird to think about this stuff because it’s important to have just in case but we hope to never need it at all, but as I said earlier, I think the odds of any of us never experiencing a disaster are getting lower all the time.

I hope this guide helps you feel ready for disasters and eases your anxiety, as it has mine. If you think I missed anything important, please let me know! Remember to include your close and local friends in your emergency plans. No one survives alone!