voter guide

Voter Guide: November 3, 2026 California General Election

Posted on by Lindsey Halsell / 0 Comment

Hello, friends and enemies! I hope you’re ready for another election. This time around, we’re picking our next governor along with a lot of other statewide positions. We have 14 tricky statewide propositions to decide on, and a whole bunch of judges for our consideration. If you’re in Elk Grove or the Sacramento area, make sure to read to the end to get my thoughts on our local races.

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Reminders and Resources for California Voters

Disclaimer: I am not an expert on politics or government. I’m just a person who’s good at reading and looking things up. If you trust my judgment, you can vote how I vote. You can also use my guide as a starting point for your own research.

Quick Reference

This table summarizes how I’m planning to vote in this election. I explain my choices below!

Position/PropositionMy vote
Proposition 1Yes
Proposition 2Yes
Proposition 3Yes
Proposition 4Yes
Proposition 5Yes
Proposition 37Yes
Proposition 38No
Proposition 39No
Proposition 40Yes
Proposition 41No
Proposition 42No
Proposition 43No
Proposition 44No
Proposition 45No
GovernorXavier Becerra
Lieutenant GovernorFiona Ma
Secretary of StateShirley Weber
ControllerMalia Cohen
TreasurerEleni Kounalakis
Attorney GeneralRob Bonta
Insurance CommissionerJane Kim
Board of Equalization District 1Nelson Esparza
Superintendent of Public InstructionRichard Barrera
Representative (Congressional District 7)Mai Vang
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court: Joshua GrobanYes
Associate Justice of the Supreme Court: Kelli M. EvansYes
Administrative Presiding Justice, Court of Appeal, Third District: Laurie EarlYes
Associate Justice, Court of Appeal, Third District: Lauri DarmellYes
Associate Justice, Court of Appeal, Third District: David B. SaapYes
Associate Justice, Court of Appeal, Third District: Stacy Boulware EurieYes
Associate Justice, Court of Appeal, Third District: Jonathan RennerYes
Associate Justice, Court of Appeal, Third District: Aimee A. FeinbergYes
Associate Justice, Court of Appeal, Third District: Shama MesiwalaYes
Senate District 8Angelique Ashby
Assembly District 10Stephanie Nguyen
Measure HYes
Elk Grove Unified School District Governing Board Member, Trustee Area 4Delia Baulwin
Florin Resource Conservation District Director (pick up to three)Kimberly Martin, John Moua, and Paul Lindsay

Propositions

Proposition 1

AUTHORIZES BONDS FOR HOUSING AFFORDABILITY PROGRAMS. LEGISLATIVE STATUTE.

My vote: YES

Proposition 1 would authorize the state to sell $11.25 billion in bonds to fund affordable housing, including multifamily houses, places for college students to live, and home loan assistance for veterans. California would repay the bond over 25 years, and according to the analysis by the legislative analyst, “The estimated annual cost would be about one-quarter of 1 percent (0.25 percent) of the state’s total General Fund budget,” which is not too much even though the idea of $11 billion sounds crazy to us peasants. While it does trouble me that AirBNB is spending money to support this proposition because I don’t really trust their motives, they are just one of many official supporters. The Official Voter Information Guide doesn’t even have an argument against this proposition because we all know the housing situation is dire and we need to build more!

Proposition 2

INCREASES STATE’S RAINY DAY FUND. LEGISLATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.

My vote: YES

The gist of Proposition 2 is that it would allow the state to keep more money in its “Rainy Day Fund,” which functions something like a savings account, instead of being forced to spend any excess money at the end of the fiscal year. Currently, the state is required to save 10 percent of General Fund taxes in its rainy day fund. If we pass Proposition 2, the state would be required “to make deposits into the rainy day fund until it reaches 20 percent of General Fund taxes,” and it would make larger deposits when things are going well economically. The main idea here is that having more savings would better protect our budget against the whims of a volatile economy. Considering how volatile the economy has been lately, this strikes me as a wise idea.

The people arguing against Proposition 2 are saying that the state should use any excess money to pay off debts instead of saving funds for later. However, the state constitution already requires California to make extra debt payments equal to the amount that the state deposits in the rainy day fund each year, but this requirement ends in 2030.

Something amusing is that no one is spending money to support or oppose Proposition 2. I usually look at who’s throwing cash at these things to get a sense of who stands to benefit from any given proposition, but apparently no one feels that strongly about Prop 2. However, I will note that one of the main organizations against this proposition is the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. This is some kind of conservative or maybe libertarian group that pops up in every election to do everything they can to decrease taxes (for rich people). When they want something, it’s generally safe for me to assume I want the opposite.

Proposition 3

PROVIDES PERMANENT FUNDING FOR SCHOOLS AND HEALTH CARE BY EXTENDING EXISTING TAX ON HIGH INCOMES. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT

My vote: YES

Surely you all know by now that I am always going to vote to fund schools and healthcare and this is an easy one. The funding for Proposition 3 will come from a tax on people earning over $371,000 (“adjusted annually for inflation,” nice). In fact, this tax is already in effect thanks to Proposition 30, which we approved in 2012 and would otherwise expire in 2031. This year’s Proposition 3 would make that tax permanent, so it’s not even a new tax. The Legislative Analyst estimates that this would bring in $5 to $15 billion annually. You know who’s against this one? The Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, of course.

This is as good a place as any to relate my philosophy on taxes. Taxes are the membership dues of society. A lot of rich people complain about high taxes in California and threaten to leave if taxes go up. However, they rarely actually leave because California is nice to live in. You know why it’s so nice? People paying taxes. I want the people I share society with to get an education and have access to healthcare and live as well as they can. Not just because I think we all deserve that at a bare minimum for existing when no one asked to be alive, but because I don’t want to be a miserable king of the trash heap surrounded by suffering. Anyway, these people can absolutely afford to keep paying a tax that they’re already paying.

Proposition 4

REPEALS PROHIBITION AGAINST PUBLIC FUNDING OF ELECTION CAMPAIGNS. LEGISLATIVE STATUTE.

My vote: YES

This might sound crazy in our post-Citizens United era, but it’s actually possible to use public funds for elections instead of making candidates beg every rich person and corporate entity for cash. Currently, the California Political Reform Act “bans the use of public funds for political candidates’ campaigns,” with some exceptions (cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco do provide public funds for some campaigns). Proposition 4 would eliminate this rule and allow “state and local governments to create public campaign financing programs in the future if they wish.” Voting in favor of Proposition 4 would simply make it a theoretical possibility for public funding for election campaigns; it wouldn’t be a requirement.

No one has spent any money on this proposition, but the California Republican Party and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association oppose it.

I think it would be great if we had publicly funded elections. This concept in election reform, sometimes known as “clean elections,” is one proposal for fair elections because anyone could afford to run even if they don’t have a lot of money to finance their own campaign. It could also potentially reduce lobbying and corruption, since candidates wouldn’t feel beholden to big donors and corporations who finance their campaigns and expect something in return.

Proposition 5

CHANGES RECALL ELECTION PROCESS FOR STATEWIDE OFFICERS. LEGISLATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.

My vote: YES

Do you remember the gubernatorial recall election in 2021 when conservatives wanted to recall Gavin Newsom for eating at the French Laundry during the height of the pandemic? It was a bizarre election with 46 candidates on the ballot to replace Newsom, and none of them were well-known Democrats. That’s because the current rules for recall elections require Californians to vote on the recall and choose a replacement at the same time, and the Democratic party didn’t want to incentivize us to recall Newsom. Voting yes on Proposition 5 would avoid all that the next time we have a recall election. In the case of a recall, we would have one vote about whether to go through with the recall then another election later to pick a replacement. If we voted to recall the governor, we would have the lieutenant governor serve as governor until we vote in a new one, unless the governor is recalled later in the term, in which case the lieutenant governor finishes out the term. For other positions, the role would be vacant until we vote for a replacement. I do think this will help stop frivolous recall campaigns, and if not, it will at least be easier for us to pick a replacement and not worry about accidentally electing a total nutjob.

As usual, opponents include the California Republican Party and the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, as well as the “California Republican Party and Election Integrity Project, which advocates for voter ID requirements and restrictions on mail-in voting,” No one has spent money supporting or opposing Prop 5.

Proposition 37

CREATES LOAN PROGRAM FOR MIDDLE-INCOME BUYERS OF QUALIFIED NEW HOMES. INITIATIVE STATUTE.

My vote: YES

The California Housing Finance Agency would be allowed to sell up to $25 billion in revenue bonds to “to create a down payment assistance program called the “middle-class homeownership loan” that “would cover up to 17 percent of the home price.” The program would be for households making “no more than the typical income level in their area.” This seems fine. Again, houses are expensive and it’s very hard to buy one, so anything that can help people is probably good. No one submitted an argument against Prop 37 to the Official Voter Information Guide, so I think this is fairly uncontroversial.

Proposition 38

AUTHORIZES BONDS FOR IMMUNOLOGY MEDICAL RESEARCH. INITIATIVE STATUTE.

My vote: NO

If we approve Proposition 38, California would be authorized to sell $8.4 in bonds to fund immunology and immunotherapy research. The University of California would get half of the research funding and the rest would be distributed through research grants. This legislation is a little odd because it’s so narrow in terms of what type of research this can fund and which institutions will receive the funding. Some are theorizing that this specificity is to ensure that just one institution gets all the grant money. CalMatters writes that “analysis shows that the ballot language criteria were tailored in a way that very likely excludes all but one institute in the entire state: the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy, whose prominent donor and co-founder is the chief backer of the proposition.” The article notes that Gary Michelson, billionaire and co-founder of the California Institute for Immunology and Immunotherapy is of of two backers of Proposition 38.

Funding medical research is important and the idea of funding immunology and immunotherapy research does sound appealing, but California already funds lots of research. I don’t think we need to approve this very narrow bond that seems to specifically benefit one already rich institution. Could we fund this through a permanent billionaire tax instead (too soon?)?I do wonder if people spending literal millions of dollars on this proposition might be better served by simply funding the research themselves. After all, Gary Michelson has a net worth of $1.8 billion. But what do I know.

Proposition 39

PROHIBITS CITIZENS FROM VOTING UNLESS THEY PRESENT GOVERNMENT-ISSUED IDENTIFICATION. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.

My vote: NO

This is a horrible proposition that is trying to reduce Californians’ voting power and keep us from using mail-in voting. I have previously provided a hearty argument against the SAVE Act, which is simply a voter ID law at the federal level. Please allow me to remind you that voter fraud is vanishingly rare. It’s not happening at scale. There is no voter fraud conspiracy. Immigrants are not working the system to find some kind of illegal voting loophole. One report found that “most reported incidents of voter fraud are actually traceable to other sources, such as clerical errors or bad data matching practices.” That’s it. It’s just people at work making mistakes sometimes.

We simply do not need this because registering to vote already requires verifying a person’s identity. Per the San Francisco Chronicle:

To register to vote, Californians must submit their Social Security and driver’s license information as well as their place and date of birth and current address to the Secretary of State’s Office, where their eligibility is verified. They also must declare under penalty of perjury that they are a citizen and have not been deemed ineligible to vote because they are a felon or have been found mentally incompetent to vote by a court. Voters can be required to bring documents in person to verify their eligibility, according to the Secretary of State’s Office, but generally the state’s application process allows voter registrations to be completed online.

For any fiscal conservatives out there, please note that the legislative analyst’s estimate suggests that passing this proposition would result in “state and local government costs of
between tens of millions of dollars and low hundreds of millions of dollars each year to implement new voting requirements.” We would be spending a bunch of money to solve a problem that doesn’t exist as a means of keeping more people from voting. This is antithetical to democracy.

Propositions 40, 41, and 42

This is annoying but we have to consider these three propositions as a group. Proposition 40 is the “billionaire tax” and we want that to pass. If Propositions 41 or 42 receive more “yes” votes than Proposition 40, that could cancel out a “yes” on Prop 40. Both Propositions 41 and 42 are funded by the same group that is opposing Proposition 40. Here’s the short version:

  • Proposition 40: YES
  • Proposition 41: NO
  • Proposition 42: NO

Proposition 40

IMPOSES ONE-TIME TAX ON CERTAIN TAXPAYERS. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT AND STATUTE.

My vote: YES

If you’ve heard anything in the news or seen political ads about a “billionaire tax,” this is it. Proposition 40 would impose a 5 percent tax on certain taxpayers with assets over $1 billion. It’s important to note that this is a one-time tax and 90 percent of the tax revenue would go to health care. The hope is that this tax would get California some of the funds it needs for healthcare after federal cuts.

California is home to about 250 billionaires with a combined net worth of $2,463.3 billion. This law concerns very few people and an immense quantity of money. Given these numbers, this one-time tax would bring in about $108 billion for the state. They will still be unimaginably rich after paying a 5 percent tax bill. If you’re wondering how much billionaires pay in taxes right now, the tax rate for any income over $731,312 is 12.3 percent. However, most billionaires are getting money from assets like stocks, real estate, etc. Frankly, I am not a tax accountant and can’t tell you how all that shakes out but I am completely confident that all billionaires can afford to pay more taxes.

These billionaires have cash to spare and we know this because they have spent a ridiculous amount of money opposing Proposition 40. The group that has spent the most to oppose Prop 40 is Building A Better California, a political action committee (PAC) with $88.5 million. Building a Better California (“better for whom?” I ask) is led by Google cofounder Sergey Brin who has donated $102 million to the PAC as of September 23. Brin has a net worth of $267.7 billion, which means his tax bill if Prop 40 passes would be $13.38 billion dollars, or put another way: $13,380,000,000. California is short around $30 billion in federal funding for Medi-Cal, so actually we only have to tax a few of these guys to make up the difference. I think all billionaires should take some time to reflect on historical consequences for amassing too much money at the expense of the population.

One argument I see about taxing the wealthy is that they will leave, taking their sweet, sweet potential tax revenues with them. I don’t buy it. People live in California because it’s nice. California has more billionaires than any other state. Money is no object for these people so we know they live here because this is where they want to be. They don’t want to move to Texas, Nevada, or whatever stateside tax haven people think they will go to. If they wanted that, they would already live there. Let’s call their fucking bluff and make them pay into a system that they benefit from. I have also seen the argument that Prop 40 isn’t doing enough or won’t distribute the funds correctly. To this I say: I do not care. Billionaires have enough money that we could do this again next year and they would still be filthy rich.

Proposition 41

PROHIBITS NEW STATE TAXES THAT EXCLUDE REVENUES FROM STATE SPENDING LIMIT. REQUIRES AUDITS FOR NEW STATE SPECIAL TAXES. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.

My vote: NO

Per the CalMatters voter guide, “This proposition would make it harder to pass new special taxes by requiring the state auditor to review any special tax proposal before it goes to voters. The auditor would assess whether the program that would receive funding could cut spending by at least 10% annually.” This is another one that sounds kind of good, like, yeah, we should have a review of proposed taxes. However, any propositions that we vote on (for example, Proposition 40 which would create a one-time tax on billionaires) are already subject to a review process. The Attorney General works with the Legislative Analyst’s Office and the Department of Finance to conduct a fiscal review, and the legislature is required to hold at least one public hearing about the proposed legislation.

The main purpose of Proposition 41 is to cancel out Proposition 40. It’s primary sponsor is Sergey Brin, yes, the same guy funding the Build a Better California PAC that has spent millions of dollars opposing the one-time billionaire tax. A bunch of other rich guys, like Stewart Resnick (the President of The Wonderful Company [that’s the people who make the pomegranate juice]) and Tony Xu (the DoorDash CEO) support this. We don’t need this. Let’s not fall for this trap.

Proposition 42

PROHIBITS NEW STATE PERSONAL PROPERTY TAXES AND CERTAIN RETROACTIVE STATE TAXES. INITIATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT.

My vote: NO

Proposition 42 is another trap designed to negate Proposition 40. It’s primary supporter is the PAC Building a Better California, which has contributed $97 million to this cause. Why does a group of billionaires want us to pass this so badly? Maybe because they stand to benefit. According to CalMatters, “Proposition 42 would make it much harder to create a wealth tax in California by prohibiting new taxes on the mere ownership of assets such as investment accounts, business interests and personal property.” Because Proposition 40 is a tax on wealth, not income, Proposition 42 could cancel it out by prohibiting taxes on wealth and assets.

Proposition 43

LIMITS VOTERS’ ABILITY TO RAISE REVENUES FOR LOCAL GOVERNMENT SERVICES. LEGISLATIVE CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT

My vote: NO

This is another proposition designed to make it harder for us to tax anyone. Currently, ballot measures like these need a simple majority of over 50 percent to pass. If Proposition 43 passed, our state constitution would be amended so that ballot measures to approve local government taxes would require a two-thirds approval. Prop 43’s supporters include the California Republican Party, various rich people, and our old friends the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association. I have a feeling that this would not be in our best interests.

Proposition 44

REQUIRES COMMUNITY HEALTH CLINICS SPEND 90% OF REVENUE ON PROGRAM SERVICES. INITIATIVE STATUTE

My vote: NO

This is one of those propositions that sounds good at first, but falls apart the more you read. Stay with me.

This proposition concerns Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs), which are a type of community clinic that often provides care to low-income or uninsured populations. Voting yes would require that private, nonprofit versions of these clinics spend 90 percent of their revenue on “program services.” (Note that most FQHCs are nonprofits.) According to the legislative analysis, these clinics “currently report spending an average of about 80 percent of their revenue on providing health care services.”

The text of the proposed law notes that some clinics “sometimes” spend 30 to 40 percent on management and administrative expenses, and some clinics can be “highly profitable, sometimes reporting annual surpluses of as much as 20 percent of total revenue.” Prop 44 also proposes a whole oversight and penalty scheme involving the attorney general and clinics paying fines based on whatever percentage under 90 they spent on anything other than “program services.”

It took me a while to figure out the issue with this proposition. I was curious because its only real supporter (and the group that got it on the ballot in the first place) is the Service Employees International Union-United Healthcare Workers West, while the California Medical Association, Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, the California Democratic Party, and others (including the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association!) are against it. The main issue seems to be that “the proposition’s vague wording could result in vital services being excluded from the list of program expenses permitted in the 90% of revenues.” I looked at the text of the proposed law to figure out what it defines as “program services”—a term that seems intuitive but could end up meaning almost anything—and it does not define this at all. This suggests to me that this is not a good piece of legislation. The crux of the whole bill is “program services,” but that isn’t defined. I’ve seen some comments suggest that mental health care might not be a part of “program services,” which would be a problem.

Finally, there is an ongoing lawsuit about this proposition. Per Ballotpedia, “California Primary Care Association and Open Door Community Health Centers filed a lawsuit against California Secretary of State Shirley Weber (D) and the initiative sponsors, arguing the measure violated federal laws and regulations regarding strict spending requirements on nonprofit health clinics that serve low-income patients.” This is too much drama for one law. Let’s not vote for it.

Proposition 45

MODIFIES ENVIRONMENTAL REVIEW FOR CERTAIN PROJECTS. INITIATIVE STATUTE.

My vote: NO

This proposition would amend the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), originally signed into law in 1970, by creating “new procedures for certain types of projects that it defines as ‘essential’.”

One aspect of this that sounds good but that will probably be bad is that the new review process would require consulting “California native tribes that have been formally recognized by the federal government,” but the legislative analysis notes that “Current law requires the agency—not the applicant—to develop and consider multiple project alternatives that could reduce environmental impacts.” This would actually reduce the involvement of California Natives by limiting the review process to only those that are federally recognized.

I can’t claim to understand all the intricacies of how Proposition 45 would change the CEQA and whether that would be good or bad (almost as if this should be a question for experts and not the voters, but here we are). So, let’s check in with who wants to see this proposition become a law. The biggest supporter of Proposition 45 is the political action committee Building A Better California, whose main reason for being is opposing the billionaire tax (Proposition 40), but they are dabbling in other legislation. They have contributed $10 million in support of Proposition 45 (chump change for a group of billionaires). Other big proponents of Prop 45 are building industry and real estate groups, while opposition is coming from groups like the Sierra Club and the California League of Women Voters. In general, I don’t assume a group of billionaires has my best interests at heart. It sounds like rich people and real estate groups think they will benefit from this, so it’s a no from me. Let’s keep our environmental review process as it is.

Statewide Offices

In some ways, deciding who to vote for in the general election is easier than in the primary. There are way fewer people running, and we don’t have to concern ourselves with the game theory of the “open” primary. I have a long-standing policy not to vote for any Republicans. There is no reason to support a party that is standing by while their leader is running a pointless war, still thinks the 2020 election was “stolen,” encouraged supporters to violently overturn the election, and is a serial rapist. So, if the option is between a Democrat and a Republican, I am voting Democrat. I do wish we had more exciting candidates for some of these positions, but we are working with what we have!

Governor

My vote: Xavier Becerra

I think Becerra is a perfectly fine candidate and I dearly hope he will piss me off less than Governor Newsom has (this isn’t about Newsom but, while we’re here: he proclaimed a “Ronald Reagan Day,” is personally out there tearing up homeless encampments, signed the stupid age-verification law that will require you to give your “operating system provider” your ID, is an asshole about trans people in sports, and has insisted that California employees be in the office four days a week for no good reason). In any case, Becerra says he supports health care for all (he was the Secretary of Health and Human Services under Biden!), although he does clarify that he wants to “build toward universal coverage,” which is a little wishy-washy for me but still better than nothing. He also supports using renewable energy and affordable housing. Great!

Anyway, I am certainly not going to vote for Steve Hilton, who is just some rich guy and who received Trump’s endorsement.

Lieutenant Governor

My vote: Fiona Ma

While Fiona Ma was not my first, second, or third choice for Lieutenant Governor in the primary, she is now my first choice because the alternative is Republican Gloria Romero. Ma is currently our treasurer, so at least she’s not new to government. Her website is light on actual policy but she says she wants to “make college more affordable and ensure seniors can age with dignity,” so those are at least things that sound good, if not particularly tangible.

In contrast, the Republican candidate Gloria Romero says she supports “school choice” (this usually means defunding public education and funneling more students to charter schools), “defend[ing] Title IX for our daughters in sports” (read: she plans to limit the rights of transgender people), and “fight[ing] antisemitism on our campuses” (read: she loves Israel and hates student protestors).

Secretary of State

My vote: Shirley N. Weber

Shirley Weber is our current Secretary of State and I have no complaints. The main job of the Secretary of State is to run our elections, which is why I will absolutely not vote for a Republican. They’ve spent years falsely claiming that elections are being “stolen.” If you think the whole enterprise of elections is corrupt, why submit yourself to it? Meanwhile, Weber wants to encourage more people to vote and opposes voter ID laws, so she has my vote.

Controller

My vote: Malia Cohen

Malia Cohen is our current state Controller. Her platform includes things like increasing affordable housing (noting she recently approved a bond for affordable student housing) and expanding access to health care.

Meanwhile, Republican challenger Herb Morgan seems to be proposing a California equivalent of the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency” (and his site definitely uses AI-generated images. Gross.) Let us take a moment to recall that DOGE’s cuts to foreign aid resulted in hundreds of thousands of deaths. Morgan’s platform also mentions audits a lot as if we don’t already have an Office of State Audits and Evaluations. If he can’t figure out how California spends its money, that sounds like a skill issue.

Treasurer

My vote: Eleni Kounalakis

I am voting for Kounalakis as the Democratic candidate, but I still don’t really like her. As I wrote in my primary election voter guide in June, “I think she’s more focused on her real estate portfolio than supporting regular Californians. Last year, when Kounalakis was planning to run for governor instead of treasurer, CalMatters reported that she ‘earns millions of dollars annually from extensive property investments around the Sacramento region and beyond,’ which would be a notable conflict of interest.” Still, she can’t be worse than the Republican candidate Jennifer Hawks who seems to be running the same platform as controller candidate Herb Morgan. Again … if you can’t figure out where the state money is going, you probably don’t know what you’re doing. Learn how to submit a FOIA. Also Hawks’ biggest campaign donor is herself, which I always find a little tragic.

Attorney General

My vote: Rob Bonta

Rob Bonta is currently our attorney general and he has already weighed in on an issue that is important to me: automated license plate reader (ALPR) data. In 2023, he issued bulletins reminding law enforcement agencies that California law prohibits sharing ALPR data outside of California or using it for immigration enforcement. I think that overall he is doing useful things and his platform is solid. Republican challenger Michael Gate’s platform talks about “defending title IX and parents’ rights” (read: he plans to limit the rights of transgender people), “ensuring election integrity” (which means he probably thinks the 2020 election was “stolen”), and “defending the second amendment” (I don’t personally think our right to bear arms needs any more support). Don’t vote for that guy.

Insurance Commissioner

My vote: Jane Kim

This is one of the only races where our “top two” primary system has paid off with two Democratic candidates. Jane Kim was my choice in the primary and I’m going to stick with her. She has a coherent, specific plan for what she wants to do as insurance commissioner and the things she wants to do would actually help regular people. She wants to establish a single-payer version of universal disaster insurance to help address the effects of climate change. She’s proposing public-option car insurance and ending pricing discrimination. Now that she mentions it, why do insurance companies get to use price discrimination?

The other candidate, Ben Allen, would probably also be a perfectly good insurance commissioner. His platform also seems solid, so I think we are going to be fine whoever wins this race.

Board of Equalization District 1

My vote: Nelson Esparza

Esparza was also who I voted for in the primary, largely because he was the Democrat with a coherent platform and he said he wants make sure that “the wealthy are paying their fair share.” Great goal! The Republican candidate, Shannon Grove, says she is fighting to make sure we’re not being “overtaxed.” I’m a lot more worried about undertaxing the rich. Shannon, we’re simply not on the same page here.

Superintendent of Public Instruction

My vote: Richard Barrera

I’m voting for Barrera because he genuinely has a lot of experience working in schools and communities, which is important for this kind of job. You have to know what it’s like to be in a school so you can set policies that make sense. The fact that his platform includes “making housing affordable for educators” is huge. Teachers get paid shit and can’t even afford to live near where they teach half the time. He seems like someone who gets it.

Sonja Shaw’s website claims that “radical ideologies distract from learning,” but does not clarify which “radical” ideologies these are. I can only assume this is some kind of dog whistle about not wanting to teach critical race theory (which, by the way, is not something anyone is teaching in elementary school; this is grad school stuff). She also states that “Mask and vaccine mandates ignored families’ well-being, silencing parents’ voices.” I do not understand how a vaccine that protects people from the most severe effects of a virus is “ignoring families well-being,” but I guess she’s entitled to her opinion. However, I would like those opinions not to be the prevailing view of the Superintendent of Public Instruction.

I don’t necessarily think using an AI-generated image is inherently disqualifying but if someone running for office is going to include this stuff in their official materials, they either aren’t paying enough attention or just don’t care. Look at the arm of the girl on the left. Come on.

screenshot from Sonja Shaw's website showing an image of kids in a classroom that is clearly AI generated. A girl on the left is raising a hand that extends improbably far above her head.

Judicial

All these judicial positions are non-partisan, so they don’t fall under any particular party. There is a whole vetting process for them, but the public gets to confirm whether or not we want the judges. Since they’re not running for office in the same way someone like Xavier Becerra is, they don’t have campaign websites, but we can still look them up for a vibe check. I’m mostly looking for whether they have experience that broadly aligns with my values and trying to make sure I don’t vote for a secret Nazi.

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court: Joshua Groban

My vote: YES

This is a rare California judge with his own Wikipedia page! Groban is currently an incumbent and has been on the California Supreme Court since 2018, when he was appointed by Governor Brown. We last reaffirmed him as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court in the 2022 election. According to a 2020 analysis by Ballotpedia, Groban’s “past partisan behavior” suggests that he is a strong Democrat. Seems like a safe choice!

Associate Justice of the Supreme Court: Kelli M. Evans

My vote: YES

Justice Evans is currently an Associate Justice of the California Supreme Court. She used to be the Associate Director of the ACLU of Northern California and was a Senior Trial Attorney in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. You may also be interested to learn that she’s a lesbian (for the record, I did not get online and ask the internet if these judges are gay. I was searching for news about them and found this article about “out CA justices” in this election). She sounds good to me.

Administrative Presiding Justice, Court of Appeal, Third District: Laurie Earl

My vote: YES

Laurie Earl has been a judge on the Sacramento County Superior Court and, more recently, served on the Third District Court of Appeal after being appointed by Governor Newsom in 2021. I found an article about how she helped the Third District Court work their way out of a case backlog, which is great news, and it mentioned a few rulings that make it sound like she’s on the side of the people more than of corporations. If you’re wondering, Earl is also a lesbian.

Associate Justice, Court of Appeal, Third District: Lauri Darmell

My vote: YES

Governor Newsom appointed Lauri Darmell to the Third District Court of Appeal this year, so she will be new to this court. She has previously been a judge on the Sacramento County Superior Court and an attorney in private practice. Based on her public profile, she has some feminist bona fides: Governor Brown appointed her to serve on the California Commission on the Status of Women and Girls where she co-founded the California Pay Equity Task Force.

Associate Justice, Court of Appeal, Third District: David B. Saap

My vote: YES

As with Lauri Darmell, David Saap was appointed to the Third District Court of Appeal this year. Saap currently works in the Governor’s Office as Newsom’s Legal Affairs Secretary, according to the Sac Bee. He has served as legal counsel at the California State Board of Education and the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, so that is promising.

Associate Justice, Court of Appeal, Third District: Stacy Boulware Eurie

My vote: YES

Stacy Boulware Eurie has served as an Associate Justice of the Court of Appeal, Third District since 2022. I couldn’t find a lot of information about her beyond the official profile. There is a profile of her from 2017 and another article about her from this year on the Daily Journal, but they are paywalled and none of my normal tricks to get at the article are working. In the 2017 profile, she does say that Orson Scott Card is her favorite author and I do judge her for that but it’s not serious enough for me not to vote for her.

Associate Justice, Court of Appeal, Third District: Jonathan Renner

My vote: YES

Jonathan Renner has been a judge on the Court of Appeal, Third District since 2014 when he was appointed by Governor Brown, so we must have voted to approve this man as a judge multiple times by this point. There isn’t much of interest about him online, but he did co-author the ruling that Governor Newsom was within his rights to move all of California to mail-in voting in 2020 during the height of the pandemic. I love voting by mail, so I know we at least agree on this. I’ll vote for him.

Administrative Presiding Justice, Court of Appeal, Third District: Aimee A. Feinberg

My vote: YES

Aimee Feinberg has been on the Court of Appeal since 2024 and, before that, served as a Deputy Solicitor General in the California Department of Justice. She clerked for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Bryer who, per Wikipedia, “was generally associated with the liberal wing of the Court.” That seems like a good sign.

Associate Justice, Court of Appeal, Third District: Shama Mesiwala

My vote: YES

Shama Mesiwala has been a judge on the California Court of Appeal since 2023. If her profile is anything to go on, Justice Mesiwala stays extremely busy. Before joining the Appellate Court, she was a judge with the Sacramento County Superior Court where she “created Northern California’s first Indian Child Welfare Act courtroom” and “served as the Americans with Disabilities (ADA) judge for the Hall of Justice.” She co-founded the South Asian Bar Association of Sacramento and was “the first South Asian American female and Muslim American female on any appellate court in California.” She has my vote.

Local

Measure H

My vote: YES

Measure H is was put on the ballot by the Los Rios Community College District to authorize funding “to maintain affordable college and career-training facilities, prepare students, workers, and veterans for jobs, provide safe drinking, water and repair leaky roofs.” The funds will come from the community college district issuing bonds, which according to the Sac Bee, will be “repaid by local property owners through a hike in property taxes over several years. It is estimated that Measure H will annually add $16.55 per $100,000 of a property’s assessed — not market — value to local homeowners’ tax bill.” If you can afford a house, you can probably afford another $16 a year in taxes. This bond would come right as the previously authorized Los Rios bonds are ending, which means taxes would not go up. You know I’m always going to vote in favor of education, so this is a yes for me.

United States Representative, Congressional District 7

My vote: Mai Vang

I’m voting for Vang because she actually has some progressive vision and has been out meeting with the people. Per SF Gate, “Vang wants to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, supports both the federal wealth tax proposal from U.S. Rep. Ro Khanna and the state wealth tax ballot initiative, and supports the single-payer health care reform proposal called Medicare for all.” Her platform overall is progressive and full of things we really need like universal child care and ending funding for Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza. It would be great to have her as our congressperson after decades of Matsui signing off on military funding and various modern horrors.

State Senator District 8

My vote: Angelique Ashby

Angelique Ashby is our current state senator and she is running against Republican Susan Mason. I like Ashby’s stance on the issues and I am certainly not going to vote for a Republican, so Ashby gets my vote again. The Sac Bee reports that “Mason has been endorsed by the Sacramento County Republican Party, but does not have a campaign website and did not have a campaign committee as of the end of 2025.” It looks like Mason doesn’t have a campaign website here in October 2026 either. Bold strategy.

State Assembly District 10

My vote: Stephanie Nguyen

Stephanie Nguyen is our current state assemblymember. Nguyen is a little too pro-cop for my liking, but she’s better than the alternative. Her opponent Republican Vinya Singh wants to “make California great again,” so I’m not voting for that shit.

Elk Grove Unified School District Governing Board Member, Trustee Area 4

My vote: Delia Baulwin

Delia Baulwin has been a trustee since her appointment in 2025. She has worked as a teacher and has been a board member of EG SPEAKS, which advocates for neurodivergent students. The priorities on her website all sound like good things.

While Baulwin has a statement in the county voter guide, her opponent Craig Townsend does not. I know candidates have to pay by the word to appear in the guide, but it still seems like they don’t care much about their campaign if they don’t have anything in there. Townsend appears to have a Facebook page for his campaign, which features a photo that must be at least 20 years old given that his occupation is listed as “retired.” The Facebook page says he was a real estate broker for 32 years. I do not think this qualifies him to serve on the school board. His Instagram page is full of AI-generated flyers about “parents rights” [sic]. This is not a serious candidate.

Florin Resource Conservation District Director

My votes: Kimberly Martin, John Moua, Paul Lindsay

The Florin Resource Conservation District (FRCD) is now known as the Elk Grove Water District, although it seems like the old name persists in the election materials. The Board of Directors governs the FRCD. Essentially, these are the people setting the policies on water use for Elk Grove. The ballot directs us to “vote for no more than three” of the four candidates, so you really only have to pick one to leave out.

  • Paul Lindsay is the current FRCD chair and has been in this position since December 2022. He seems to be involved in just about every civic activity available to him.
  • Bret Bartholomew (and John Moua) received an endorsement from Mayor Bobbie Singh-Allen. I am personally very sick of our mayor just at the moment, so this doesn’t count for much for me. I also don’t appreciate people putting most of their campaign information on Facebook. Reminder to all: Facebook is not public. If someone does not have a Facebook account, they cannot see the information you’re posting.
  • John Moua is the only person with any media coverage. The Hmong Daily News has covered his bid to join the FRCD board, noting that he currently “serves as an acting branch chief with the California Air Resources Board, managing a team of software engineers and developers,” so at least he has some experience with environmental issues. He has also served on a number of committees in Elk Grove, including the Consumnes Community Services Park Advisory Committee. Moua has a real website for his campaign that lists his stance on the issues of cost, safety, and service. It’s simple but effective.
  • Kimberly Martin does not have much of an online presence, but I did find that she is a member of the FRCD Community Advisory Committee, which probably makes her one of the more qualified candidates. She also seems to be associated with the Green Party which, at the local level, I think is a good thing.

Elk Grove City Council, District 4

I live in District 1 of Elk Grove, so this is neither my circus nor my monkeys, but Peggy Parks, a challenger for the Elk Grove City Council District 4 seat has been endorsed by the Republican Party. She has an extremely vague platform that could mean just about anything. If this is your district, I recommend proceeding with caution.

A Note on the Elk Grove Mayoral Race that Wasn’t

The Elk Grove mayor should be on the ballot right now, but that position, and the District 2 City Council seat are not up for a vote. Mayor Bobbie Singh-Allen and Councilmember Rod Brewer were set to run unopposed this year. Rather than go through the democratic process, the City of Elk Grove “unanimously appointed [them] to new terms then canceled the November election for their seats.” I do think we deserve the chance to vote (or abstain from voting, or write in a candidate) for mayor even if there is no opposition. I’m disappointed in the city for doing it like this.

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You made it to the end! I invite you to share this post if you found it useful. Please leave a comment if you think I missed something important. Thanks for voting!

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: October 4, 2026

Posted on by Lindsey Halsell / 0 Comment

Hello, friends and enemies. It’s October! It’s fall! It’s 100 fucking degrees outside! At the time of this writing (Saturday afternoon), we are having our carpets cleaned, which means the front door is partially open for the series of tubes involved in shampooing the carpets and the heat is getting in. We also couldn’t find Fritz for a while and I was freaking out thinking he got outside. Fortunately, this guy’s instinct is not to run outside, it’s to wedge himself into a corner between the couch and the wall, then shimmy underneath the couch when someone tries to extract him. So, my house is hot, my carpet is clean, my cat is a little freak. Let’s go!

Current Events

I am still out here talking about problems with Flock and Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs)! I was on the news twice in the last two weeks: in this longer piece on CBS 13 Sacramento and in another from Spectrum News. I didn’t get a ton of air time in the CBS piece but I did find it funny that one part cut straight from me to the CEO of Flock. The Spectrum piece was very favorable and included some good bits. Who knows where I’ll pop up next!

There is some alarming surveillance stuff in the news recently and I think it really highlights why opposing ALPRs, and mass surveillance more broadly, is so important. 404 Media reported on a program called High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA), which the federal government is using “to obtain data from local cops’ Flock, Axon, and other ALPR cameras and aggregate it on federal government servers, where it is then accessible to other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.” It’s illegal to share ALPR data gathered in California with federal agencies (SB 34, 2016), so whatever is going on here is, at the very least, violating that law. The DeFlock Elk Grove Community Audit data do indicate that our data appeared in some searches by the HIDTA program. As usual, we have many unanswered questions about where all this information ends up and what it is being used for. Still, I can’t imagine they’re doing anything nice with it.

For another insane use of ALPRs: It was recently reported that the Pentagon has Flock cameras in their parking lot, which means a private corporation could know a whole lot about what is happening in the government. I would argue that Flock shouldn’t have access to that information and I would like to know what kind of benefit the Pentagon thinks it’s getting from this. Meanwhile, the US Postal Service is “running a pilot program to put cameras in its mail carrier trucks that continuously scan roads and signs, map roadways and sidewalks” in partnership with a company called Next Base. Similarly, Amazon is about to launch a program in which drivers will wear “smart delivery glasses,” and they “expect to have more than 20,000 of its AI-powered Smart Delivery Glasses in the field by the end of 2027.” The cameras on the glasses “can capture thousands of images during a shift,” which will be fed into Amazon’s AI and presumably catch a bunch of people answering the door in their pajamas to grab a package. Not to mention they could pick up information about anything else the driver is looking at while on the job. Given the amount of ground Amazon delivery drivers cover in the aggregate, this is a surveillance nightmare. If you haven’t already stopped using Amazon, this is a great time to quit (it’s not really possible to opt out of the postal service, however). I do not want to support a company that is forcing their workers to act as roving surveillance cameras and that has no way for consumers to opt out of (I almost said no way for “customers” to opt out, but it’s clear that whoever pays for the product all this data is feeding in to is the actual customer, not people ordering shit from the Amazon storefront). If you’re looking for alternatives to Amazon and other mega-corporations, I recommend checking out the resources on Cut Off the Spigot.

We also saw some recent attempted legislation related to surveillance. This week, Governor Gavin Newsom “vetoed a bill that would have prohibited people from secretly record others using smart glasses in certain spaces” like changing rooms and doctors’ offices. The bill also “would have forced manufacturers … to include an indicator that’s on when the devices are recording.” Glad to know Newsom is fine with people wearing the pervert glasses anywhere (sarcasm! I hate Gavin Newsom and will keep hating him in public when he inevitably announces his presidential run). However, in better news, in Congress, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a bill that would “bar federal agencies from using automated license plate readers or accessing data from the technology and prevent federal grants from funding states and local governments that use automated license plate readers.” I do not at all expect this to pass because clearly everyone is making a lot of fucking money from this technology and I am sure they can afford to throw a little cash at their pet legislators. Still, it’s nice to see this is getting some attention at the national level and I hope we make some progress!

Books and Other Words

book: This Inevitable Ruin. Cover features a cat atop a tower shooting lasers from her eyes
This Inevitable Ruin

I hope no one thinks less of me for this, but I am getting a little tired of Dungeon Crawler Carl. You might say, then take a break! Normally I would agree with you but I waited a long time on the library hold list and then I got the last three books in quick succession. Last week I finished book seven, This Inevitable Ruin. This was a particularly intense installment focusing on the long-awaited “faction wars” portion of the dungeon, in which real people can pay to enter the dungeon and play the game in what amounts to hunting people for sport, since the crawlers can really die but the visitors normally cannot. However, Carl and Princess Donut, whose fan club raised enough money for them to compete as a real faction instead of just being prey for rich people, got a rule instated that everyone can die for real, which pissed off a lot of rich aliens. The ending of this one irritated me somewhat (spoilers ahead). One of the main women characters, Katya, at the end of this book gets the option of skipping a few dungeon levels to attend to a “god” or getting magically pregnant and leaving the dungeon. She picks pregnancy. It does make sense based on her character’s backstory, and she clearly has wanted a child for a long time, but I found it aggravating that one of the only women in the story (unless you count Princess Donut, who is female but is a cat and more of a child than a woman) gets yoinked out on a baby-based technicality. And Katya’s character in the dungeon was very bad-ass! Matt Dinniman is removing a bad-ass woman from the game so she can have a baby! Anyway this kind of shit is why I’m tired of male authors and will be declaring a moratorium on books by men [except for Proust] for at least the rest of the year (surely reading eight Dungeon Crawler Carl books warrants this).

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Media

Last weekend we went to see Coyote vs. Acme, a movie that, I’m learning, almost no one has heard of. I only heard about it because some of the good people of Tumblr got really excited about it and that made me excited. It’s based on the Looney Tunes characters of the Coyote and the Roadrunner. Coyote, after decades of getting blown up by faulty Acme contraptions, sees an ad for a personal injury lawyer who sues Acme for its poorly made cartoon products, and hires him. From there, well, hijinks ensue. It was a lot of fun, which is not surprising to me because I have always enjoyed Looney Tunes. I also appreciated whatever brand of existential trouble is happening in this movie to make people on the internet write reviews along the lines of “we have to wonder: does Sisyphus love his boulder?”.

three panel comic. 1. Roadrunner sticking its tongue out at the Coyote and holding a sign that says "I'd kill for you" 2. Coyote holding a sign that says "What" 3. Road runner smiling toward the viewer with an atomic bomb explosion in the background
by Tumblr user sockiepuppetry

Moving It

I’ve mostly been doing pool and a little extra for my physical enrichment time. This is partly due to being busy and partly to the heat! It shouldn’t be 100 degrees in October! I am enjoying that the days are getting shorter and it’s dark by the time water aerobics is over. I love being in the pool at night! I hope everyone is enjoying my sticker reports. Here are the latest:

Stickers week of September 14
stickers in my planner featuring a sparkly chicken, a flower on roller skates, and a pot of soup
Stickers week of September 21

Kitchen Witchery

When I was at the farmers market two weeks ago, I saw that tomatoes were available and decided it must be time to make tomato soup. I had never made tomato soup from scratch before and I was very pleased with how this once turned out and how easy it was to make. I used the roasted tomato and pepper soup recipe from the Cool Beans cookbook and, yes, it does have beans in it. I used large white lima beans because that seemed like a good fit. I don’t remember what bean the recipe calls for specifically, but I think any white bean would work fine. I also bought a big bag of onions at the farmers market with intentions of making french onion something or other and settled on Smitten Kitchen’s french onion baked lentils, which is one we always like. Finally, I made another batch of broccoli cheddar beans, but I added shell noodles and, like last time I made it, chose not to bother with making croutons as the recipe calls for. This is a perfect recipe when I don’t really want to make something because I can use a bag of frozen broccoli and whatever beans I have in the freezer (I always have something in there) and it takes almost no effort.

As for treats, I have been seeing a bunch of “donut loaves” on instagram and I finally tried the cornbread variation. The idea is what if donut … but one loaf of bread. So it’s a quick bread with a donut-y flavor and texture that you glaze the hell out of. I liked it! I want to try some of the other recipes.

I thought I’d share yesterday’s farmers market findings. I bought a bunch of tomatoes and peppers with the intention of making that soup again. I’m doing a soup potluck next week and and planning to bring the tomato soup (soup spoilers?). I also got some delicata squash, onions, green beans, and a baguette! There’s a guy who sells bread at the farmers market but we usually arrive too late to get any. Yesterday we went relatively early, so I was blessed with fresh bread.

a bowl of tomato soup and a small plate with a grilled cheese sandwich cut on the diagonol
tomato soup and grilled cheese
a bowl of stew-y lentils and barley topped with melted cheese, along with some roasted green beans
french onion lentils and farro with green beans
a bowl of beans, broccoli, and shell noodles in cheese sauce
cheesy beans and broccoli with noodles
a loaf of sweet bread glazed thoroughly like a donut
cornmeal donut loaf
two bags of tomatoes, a bag of peppers, green onions, delicatta squash, green beans, and a baguette
farmers market goods

Cat Therapy

Fritz started Prozac last week and I think it’s helping? It’s hard to say for sure because SSRIs always take some time to get into the system. In any case, we have been having more success with him peeing in the litter box, or at least peeing in the bathroom next to the box, so this is good for the mood in our house.

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

my hand holding a blanket open to reveal Fritz the cat crouching inside
there’s a cat in there
Fritz the cat snoozing peacefully on top of the couch
just a sleepy guy
Fritz the cat lounging in the windowsill,
window time
weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: September 20, 2026

Posted on by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. Yesterday I came out of my accidental retirement from being a roller derby announcer and went to comment on some wheely shoe games in real life! Some people asked me if I’m “back,” and to that I say I didn’t really mean to leave, I was just busy and worried about covid (I’m still worried about covid if I’m being honest, but I am being as safe as I can be). That said, I am not planning to arrange my whole schedule around the derby calendar! I did have a lot of fun talking about derby, even if it was hard to dredge up some of the derby knowledge from my mind palace’s long-term storage. Still, I think by the end of the second game, most of it had come back to me. Everyone was very nice and complimented my outfit and my announcing. I even had some new people introduce themselves and tell me I should be announcing at every game. To that I say: thank you. And: pay me (lol kidding … but?).

me, smiling at the camera, with the announcer table and derby track behind me
greetings from roller derby
a heron standing on a log in the creek at the Davis arboretum
heron!

Last weekend, my beloved friend Lito and his boyfriend Scott came for a visit and it was great! I want to hang out with my friends every day! Whoever arranged the world in a way where it’s impossible to hang out with friends deserves to be tried in the Hague. We had such a good time that I didn’t really take any pictures other than this heron we saw at the Davis Arboretum. We mostly just hung out, watched Drag Race, and ate good food. I don’t have a lot to say about it, you kinda had to be there.

Current Events

Remember when I used to say things like “This isn’t a news blog, but …”? Simpler times. Now I am the news.

City Council Madness

I had to go again to a city council meeting to tell them they are wrong about automated license plate readers (ALPRs) like Flock. At the last meeting, the city scheduled a presentation from the police about ALPRs and why they’re great actually (citation needed). Of course, we couldn’t let that go unchecked, so DeFlock Elk Grove coordinated to do some pre-bunking of things we thought the police might say during the meeting’s open comment period then debunk after the presentation to try to set the record straight. It’s very hard to say all that needs to be said in three-minute chunks, especially when the city and the police can (and do) talk as long as they want. I believe this may be a strategy to make us all go insane listening to them.

In my comment before the presentation, I essentially gave an opening argument for why we can’t trust what the police are going to tell us about ALPRs. Here’s what I said, or you can watch the video (and see the mayor get mad at me after my comment) here.

Hello, my name is Lindsey Halsell and I am an Elk Grove resident and a member of DeFlock Elk Grove, a citizen-led advocacy group dedicated to getting automated license plate readers (also called ALPRs) like Flock and Axon out of our city.

On August 3rd, we published an audit of the city’s use of Flock based on information obtained from public records act requests. Since then, we have repeatedly attempted to meet with city officials and asked the city to hold a town hall to discuss the findings. However, the mayor and city council have not accepted our invitations. We have additionally submitted requests to the California State Auditor and the Attorney General to investigate how Elk Grove’s use of ALPRs may have violated state laws.

Tonight the police will give a presentation on its use of Flock and ALPRs. They will likely focus on their most emotional success stories, like getting a ten-year-old child home safe, solving a mosque burglary, and holding a driver accountable for a fatality. They might even mention that Sheriff Jim Cooper said yesterday that Flock helped them capture someone who “executed” a woman.

We are always glad when crimes are solved and people make it home safe. No one disputes that. But we have to ask: how much of this success is really due to ALPRs?

The Elk Grove police have stated that they credit these wins to coordination with the real-time information center, information from fixed traffic cameras, and follow-up investigations, in addition to Flock. In the case of the crime Sheriff Cooper mentioned, there were witnesses on the scene and someone had identified the suspect’s license plate. Those aren’t Flock’s successes. The police were able to find the suspect quickly because people were on the scene and saw the crime. Flock helped the police make an arrest faster. That’s it. Even with ALPRs, the police still needed to talk to people, identify suspects, and investigate the crime. If ALPRs are such strong tools, then the police should be able to tell us exactly how many cases were cleared because of Flock. If all they do is share emotional anecdotes, we don’t know if the system is as important as they claim it is, but we will know that they are trying to manipulate us into supporting them.

We also know from reporting out of the Atlanta metro, which has over 5,000 Flock cameras, that crime clearance rates have not improved since the cameras were installed. If ALPRs were that essential to solving crimes, we would expect to see much higher clearance rates, especially in Flock’s hometown.

Flock has published materials to help law enforcement convince cities that Flock is worth the risk. They advise police departments to provide a “carefully scripted presentation” and control the narrative. All the police will do tonight is attempt to win the war for the narrative. This is not a meaningful effort to hear our concerns. This is damage control after 21 people came to the last city council meeting to say we don’t want ALPRs in Elk Grove.

Flock’s materials advise police not to “avoid the concept of mass surveillance because you’re not going to convince opponents that it’s not.” Flock never claims it’s not conducting mass surveillance and they can’t truthfully claim that, which is why they have to focus on encouraging police to make emotional pleas, rather than stick to the facts. This is mass surveillance, and we don’t want it here.

The police presentation was very trying. They claimed that ALPRs do “not conduct facial recognition.” This might technically be true, but it’s a distinction without a difference. Wired and 404 Media recently reported on Flock’s code, which absolutely does track people, though I can believe it may not use facial recognition. I think the fact that the police used that specific term may be obscuring that Flock’s system can do in regards to identifying people since “facial recognition” is a specific technology.

Some of the information in the presentation apparently corroborates what DeFlock Elk Grove found in its community audit. For example, Elk Grove Police said that they removed access to Flock’s national lookup tool, which would include Elk Grove data on the Flock database for people to search, in 2024. The thing is, sharing ALPR data outside of California has been illegal per SB 34 since 2016. So, are they indirectly admitting that they broke the law for years before they stopped? This information was presented as if it’s meant to reassure us, but all I got from it was that Elk Grove Police Department was illegally sharing data with other states and federal agencies until 2024.

After the presentation, the city invited the Sacramento County Sheriff Jim Cooper to speak. He spent at least twenty minutes being very emotional and telling us that we’re terrible people for not wanting to use this technology. I was glad that I had referenced an interview Cooper had done earlier in the week, about a woman being shot and the police claiming they were able to make a quick arrest thanks to ALPRs, beforehand. While he credits ALPRs for the quick arrest, he also says that there were witnesses on the scene who saw the suspect’s license plate. What really offend me about this story though—and I didn’t know this until after the meeting—is that the woman who was killed had a restraining order against her killer. This story isn’t about the success of ALPRs, it’s about the absolute failure of the police to protect a woman who had already followed proper channels to try to keep herself safe. Police are letting women be killed in broad daylight then claiming we need a fucking panopticon to keep us safe. Once again: ALPRs can only be used reactively. They do not prevent crime; they may observe crime. What do the cops need to keep someone with an active restraining order from being killed by her stalker? Maybe we should focus on that instead of buying more cameras.

Here’s my comment after the presentation, which you can watch here.

Hello. Thank you to the police for that presentation and I wish I had as much time to speak as the sheriff did, but I suppose I will make do.

First of all, I want to reiterate that no one who’s against ALRPs is pro-crime and against victims. We want crimes to be solved. We don’t want there to be crime in the first place! But this is not the answer.

Today in the presentation, the police mentioned that they retain ALPR data for 30 days and that’s also something they’ve mentioned previously this year in another ALPR presentation. However, this does contradict the city’s ALPR Overview and Facts page, section 462.4 Data Collection and Retention states that “All ALPR data downloaded to the server should be stored for a minimum of one year” So, even though the police are giving this presentation, we’re getting conflicting information from the city and from the police about what happens to the data.

Regardless of how long the Elk Grove police think they are storing ALPR data, the reality is they have much less control than they believe. We know Flock retains data indefinitely because their own representative recently said so a few week ago in a city council meeting in Marietta, Oklahoma.

The police chief said, “We want this technology, but we want it to be done responsibly,” and we want that too. We want responsible ownership of this data, and unfortunately, Flock’s making it very clear that that’s not possible. Flock goes out of its way to gather data, whether local governments know about it or not. In Sheboygan, Wisconsin, city officials were not informed that their Flock cameras would track driving speeds and movement patterns, but after recently attempting to cancel their Flock contract, sales representatives contacted the mayor offering to sell the city five years of this very data. Flock was gathering more information than the city knew about or consented to.

Elk Grove police say they don’t have people search enabled in the Flock system. However, that doesn’t mean that Flock isn’t collecting that data. It means that search function is turned off for you. They may still be collecting the data just like we saw in this Wisconsin example. We also saw Grass Valley recently informed Flock that they were canceling their contract and had the police remove the cameras. yet Flock came out to conduct “maintenance” and reinstall the cameras.

Flock does not see individual police departments as customers. Although you are paying for Flock’s ALPRs and access to its network, the real customer is whoever buys the data. Your job is to farm information. In February, Flock updated its terms and conditions to remove the statement “Flock does not own and shall not sell Customer Data.” They state that Flock has a “perpetual, worldwide license to use and disclose customer data … and use customer data to support and improve Flock’s products and services.” These are the terms a company would have if it were using you to collect data and then selling that data behind your back.

It is at best naive for the city and the police department to assume that they have control over data collected through Flock and ALPRs.

We got a smattering of news coverage after the meeting:

I also have been taking some more media requests so there will be more Flock news in the near future.

What’s really going on between Flock and the City of Elk Grove?

I keep bringing this up when I talk to reporters but I have yet to see anyone investigate. The City of Elk Grove is adamant about how great Flock is and they keep voting unanimously to keep it and expand it, while many other cities have caved under the weight of their citizen’s disapproval. I would love to know if the City of Elk Grove has some kind of financial relationship with Flock (beyond the obvious one where the City pays Flock for its services). Like, are they getting a discount? I’m asking because Elk Grove is all over Flock’s fucking website and appears in training materials.

No one is showing up in someone else’s promotional materials free of charge. That’s a paid gig. Why is Elk Grove specifically one of Flock’s poster children? How is this affecting our city government’s decisions about the use of ALPRs? Reporters, please, I am begging you to investigate!

Books and Other Words

hardcover book: The Eye of the Bedlam Bride
The Eye of Bedlam Bride

The Eye of the Bedlam Bride is the sixth book in Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl series. This book felt like a typical mid-series book to me. There was a lot going on that seems like it will pay off in the next book (the big “faction wars” that they have been building up to, in which real people enter the dungeon to battle the crawlers), and that’s fine and normal, but this is an 800-page book. One of the game mechanics in this part of the dungeon was that the crawlers were playing a Pokemon-like game, so we had to hear a lot about cards and rules and whatnot, which is not especially my jam. I still enjoyed the book overall but I don’t think it’s the strongest in the series!

Meanwhile, on the internet:

headline: The FDA has announced a recall of salted caramel ice cream due to possible contamination with "small stones and other hard objects." The comment: Dear Americans, this week's compromised type of FOOD is *spins the wheel* ICE CREAM that has been contaminated with *spins the wheel* STONES
just spinning that wheel

Doctors Hate Her! One Weird Trick for Sleeping Well

Last time I said I got a new CPAP and it took me a few days to sort it out and sleep correctly. Well. It actually took two weeks because things did go downhill. This CPAP has a little display that tells you how many “events” per hour you experienced during the night (an event is when you stop breathing). I was putting up very high numbers for someone wearing a CPAP and Kirk said I had been snoring (exactly what using a CPAP should address). I was also waking up with a sore throat. After a night of something like eight events per hour, I decided I had to call the medical equipment company and ask them to increase the air pressure because my throat was feeling trashed and I was exhausted. I was informed that my machine was set for my prescribed air pressure and I had to talk to my doctor if I had a problem. I was not willing to wait for this shit to work through six to eight more people to be resolved.

Did you know you can find user guides online for just about any product? I got my hot little hands on the ResMed AirSense 11 guide to see how to open up the clinical options. It’s easy enough—just press two fingers on the screen and wait a moment. I discovered that yes, my air pressure was set to 11. However, CPAPs are able to adjust and give you different amounts of air throughout the night and my new CPAP was set to give me one consistent amount of air all night, no matter what. So I enabled the “Autoset” mode and set the air pressure range to cover everything (hacking!). Wouldn’t you know it? I slept so much better that night. I only had 0.4 events per hour. So, here’s a hearty “you are bad at your job and you should feel bad” to whoever set this CPAP up for me because you made me sleep horribly for two entire weeks of my life.

Moving It

camera view inside a bag of all-red gummy bears
pre-workout gummy bears

Last week I didn’t manage to work out at all, and this week isn’t quite over yet so I don’t have stickers to show you. In lieu of this, I will share with you my secret pre-workout snack for increased performance: all-red gummy bears.

Kitchen Witchery

There’s been too much going on for me to cook anything of interest, so please enjoy this photo of a burrito I made. I make the chicken in the slow cooker (throw an onion and jalapño and salt in there), use the arroz rojo recipe from Mi Cocina, and I make beans based on vibes alone.

a fat burrito on the plate with rice and cheese spilling out the top
a burrito

Cat Therapy

Fritz has been behaving a little better. We recently discovered that if we dig a hole in the litter box so that the bottom of the box is visible, he is more likely to pee there. Yes, this is diva behavior, but we are doing it because the alternative is pee on the floor. We also bought a spray that is supposed to deter cats from peeing in places (Nature’s Miracle No Spraying, I think it’s called) and that seems to help but only sort of. Fritz did see the vet last week. Apparently he is physically fine. We secured a Prozac prescription for him and he’ll be starting that soon. Let’s hope it helps him.

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. As a special treat, Kirk has granted permission to show you two pictures of him with Fritz.

Fritz the cat in the windowstill. The sun is shining through his fur creating a halo effect
serving
Fritz the cat pouting in the door to my office
Mother is ignoring me!!
Fritz the cat lying on top of Kirk
Kirk and Fritz taking a break
Fritz the cat lounging on top of Kirk. They are both looking at youtube videos on the computer
Fritz watching TV with Kirk
weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: September 6, 2026

Posted on by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. You know I love a little internet game and my new favorite is Outlier! The point of the game is to find the “rarest” words out of a set of 25 letters that changes daily. There’s a bit of meta-game guesswork in finding words and considering how rare they may be. I thought “scrying” wouldn’t be that rare, but it got me a good amount of points yesterday. My rarest words so far (from various days) have been balkanize, khalifate, and vomitoria. As usual for a word game, I find that pulling loan words and obscure declensions of historical terms gets me where I’m trying to go. I hope you all come play with me. You can connect with me on Outlier here!

my Outlier profile showing my all-time best score, average score, and ranking
Find me on Outlier!

Current Events

The DeFlock/anti-ALPR (automated license plate reader) campaign here in Elk Grove is continuing. After all the press for the community audit (discussed in my last post), we showed up at the city council meeting to let them know they’re doing a bad job and we don’t want this surveillance garbage in our city. We had 21 comments and collectively spent 45 minutes telling the city council to get its shit together. You can see my comment online here. I was very satisfied to hit the three-minute time limit exactly and end right on the buzzer. We got some good coverage from Elk Grove News, which summarized all the comments and then reported on the campaign more broadly.

If you don’t want to watch a video (I usually don’t), here’s the full text of my comment:

I am once again asking that the City end its contract with Flock Safety and that Elk Grove end its use of Automated License Plate Readers entirely, not seeking an alternative vendor after canceling Flock.

Putting everyone under constant surveillance is an inversion of how our justice system is meant to work: innocent until proven guilty. Identify a suspect, get a warrant, conduct an investigation. Using AI cameras to track everyone’s movements is the opposite of this process. There is no probable cause to surveil everyone all the time, but that’s what using ALPRs like Flock amounts to. By continuing to use these systems, the city is letting us know that we’re all in a state of perpetual guilt, just waiting for the police to decide on our crimes, which Flock’s AI system can generate using pre-written prompts provided by Flock itself.

In April, the mayor said she was open to an audit of the city’s Flock data. Several weeks ago, DeFlock Elk Grove published a community audit based on data obtained from public records act requests. The data indicate that the City of Elk Grove has violated state law by sharing our data with other states and federal agencies. The city has claimed our data are secure and not shared on Flock’s national network. Do the mayor, city counselors, and chief of police not understand how Flock works? Or are they lying about what happens to the data collected from constant surveillance

While the city and the police department have stated that our data are secure, it is clear they have no way to enforce that themselves or even confirm its truth. Two weeks ago, Flock announced updates to its privacy safeguards, recommending a seven-day retention period unless there is an active investigation. Yet a week later, a Flock representative let slip in a public meeting in Marietta, Oklahoma that they retain data indefinitely. Flock’s terms and conditions state that, even if the Elk Grove Police Department owns the data, Flock has the right to “non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide license to (a) use and disclose Customer Data to provide the Flock Services; and (b) use Customer Data to support and improve Flock’s products and services.” While the City may claim it can keep our data safe, these terms make it clear that the City does not have the power or authority to do any such thing. There is no responsible, secure way to maintain an active contract with Flock and there is no reason to believe that a company that makes its money from spying on everyone is telling the truth about what it does with the information it collects.

We deserve better than living in a city where we are constantly treated as suspects of crimes not yet committed. We should not have to be observed by a system that makes it not only possible, but trivially easy, for police officers to stalk and harass women, for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement to monitor activists, or for the federal government to observe the movements of political opponents. Whether the city believes it’s aiding and abetting the surveillance state is irrelevant; the purpose of this system is objectively to make it easier for those with power to maintain it by collecting an inordinate amount of data on all of us. The only responsible thing for the City of Elk Grove to do is end its relationship with Flock immediately and start treating us as citizens, rather than suspects.

After the meeting, I approached a Telemundo reporter who was on the scene and I did an interview! In Spanish! I do wish I had come across a little more fluidly but considering I went in with no preparation, I’m not mad. The next one will be better, I’m certain. You can watch it online here.

To everyone’s great annoyance, the city has been ignoring our group’s requests to meet and discuss the community audit. Instead, they have an item on next week’s city council meeting agenda for a “presentation of the Elk Grove Police Department’s Automated License Plate Reader technology.” I have to assume this will be a bunch of Flock corporate propaganda, especially given recent reporting from 404 Media about a leaked guide from Flock about how police can “own the narrative.” My favorite quotation from the guide is “Don’t avoid the concept of mass surveillance because you’re not going to convince opponents that it’s not” (page 4 per document numbering, page 7 per DocumentCloud numbering). I’m not sure what they think it is if it’s not mass surveillance, but it’s telling that the guide doesn’t go as far as to say “Flock is not mass surveillance.” Presumably, their legal team cut that part. The fact that the police department is doing this after DeFlock Elk Grove has repeatedly provided information about ALPRs, requested meetings, and demonstrated that this technology cannot be trusted suggests to me that the cops are, instead of facing the issues, initiating a narrative war. I have often said that, if I were evil, I would have gone into marketing because I think I’m very good at framing a narrative. Perhaps this is my time to shine in a non-evil capacity. Although I guess from a certain perspective, I’m being evil right now. Welcome to my Joker era?

Quote from the Flock "How to speak to City councils about public safety technology" guide reading "Don't avoid the concept of mass surveillance because you're not going to convince opponents that it's not."
Flock: It’s not NOT surveillance
Screenshot of the "Mass Surviellance" wikipedia article reading "Mass surveillance is the intricate surveillance of an entire or a substational fraction of a population in order to monitor that group of citizens. The surveillance is often done via the use of technologies that collect data on a large mass of individuals."
Literally the definition of mass surveillance, but okay

DeFlock Elk Grove is asking for everyone to come out and comment at the city council meeting this Wednesday, September 9. You can comment during the open comment period at the beginning of the meeting AND after the police presentation. Of course, it’s much harder to prepare remarks for a presentation that we haven’t seen yet, but if you love the challenge of speaking extemporaneously, this is your moment. For full details, check out the post on the DeFlock Elk Grove website.

Flyer asking people to show up at the city council meeting in Elk Grove on September 9 to speak out against Flock and ALPRs
Join us on September 9th at the city council meeting

Books and Other Words

The Nameless Land by Kate Elliott is the follow-up to The Witch Roads, which I talked about in my last post. The magical entity that possessed the obnoxious prince in the first book returns in this book (obviously), but in a more consensual way (love that for him) and manifests through another character, which means the reader gets to know the obnoxious prince and how having someone else’s perspective forced upon him has made him into a little less of a prat. It also means that protagonist Elen gets to spend half of the book crushing on the magical entity in a sapphic way (love that for her). I will refrain from trying to explain this story any more than that, but I did really like this book and found the ending satisfying.

Book cover for Radiant Star on Kobo ereader
Radiant Star

Radiant Star is the latest in Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series, which began with Ancillary Justice in 2013 (and which I wrote a review about when this blog was new and I thought it was going to be a book review blog! How far we have come). Although it wasn’t my most favorite of the series, it was still very good, as all Leckie’s books are, and gave me plenty to metaphorically gnaw on. I like that now, having established the terms of the Radchaai empire, Leckie is taking us outside of the empire to see how other groups view these so-called “civilized” people. She is talented at fleshing out all these little nooks in her universe and I, personally, will read every book she publishes without hesitation.

Media

I fancy myself as the kind of person who will listen to any music and I am endlessly delighted by memes on instagram to the tune of “playing my Walmart dubstep mix for the friend who ‘listens to anything.'” I know I won’t really listen to anything because I am no great fan of country or death metal or emo music, but I am finding increasingly off-the-wall things to listen to that I want to share. Two YouTube music channels I have been appreciating lately are L’atelier de Musique, which as far as I can tell is broadcasting from an alternate universe where the USSR is still going strong, and The Lounge Club, which is gathering music from many alternate universes. I listened to a set on L’atelier recently that was done on grammaphones of all things. It was great and I would like to see more of this because it’s ridiculous but also just fucking good. I also really enjoyed The Lounge Club’s cosmic grooves of the space balkans mix. So, like, Balkan music, but from the future where they’ve gone to space. Obviously. I am not sure how this DJ’s mind is working but I am enjoying the results and I invite you to join me.

Spanish

Book cover for Los comatientes on kobo ereader
Los combatientes

My quest for giving myself a masters’ degree in Spanish is well and truly begun now that I have read my first selection from my very long reading list: Los Combatientes, a novela by Cristina Morales. The story focuses on the University of Granada theater troupe and their particular brand of theater of the absurd (Waiting for Godot being referenced told me all I needed to know). Seething through the novel is a commentary on the shit that Spanish youth are going through, i.e., a massive lack of economic opportunities. The story is narrated through the troupe’s performance, which is absurd, includes a lot of sex, and involves singing songs by Franz Ferdinand and Plastic Bertrand. You know, basic theater kid stuff. If you find theater antics charming, you will probably enjoy this book. However, theater antics are insufferable to many. Potential readers, you have been forewarned. One of the lines I highlighted that exemplifies the author’s ethos (and my own) was, “De verdad que es injusto el mundo, caballero, pero tenemos la posibilidad y la obligación de cambiarlo.” (The truth is that the world is unjust, sir, but we have the possibility of and the obligation to change it.)

Corporeal Form

I had to get a new CPAP and it was a trial. I really resent that the health care system kind of just treats everyone like a criminal. Sorry, I am trying to get a machine that helps me breathe while I sleep so I don’t inadvertently stop breathing and die. I am aware this is very inconvenient for everyone involved. The latch on the humidifier of my old CPAP wore out to the point that it was popping open under the pressure (you know because CPAP is continuous positive airway pressure) and I was holding it closed at night with duct tape. I do not recommend this. My original plan was to simply get a new humidifier (since that model of CPAP has the humidifier as a separate attachment), but I learned that, for some reason, it’s no longer available in the U.S. It took me multiple phone calls to get approved for a new CPAP. Despite sending me CPAP equipment regularly, the medical equipment company claimed they did not have a prescription on file and my doctor would have to supply a new one. When I emailed my doctor, she very helpfully said “Call the sleep clinic” and nothing else. I also had to take half a day off work to schlep to the medical equipment office to get the new CPAP. An ordeal! It took a couple of nights to get dialed in with all the settings, but I am sleeping well again now, thankfully. I hope I don’t have to do this again any time soon.

Tip: if you are American, try to avoid disabilities at any cost.

Just a regular old CPAP
new CPAP

Moving It

The last two weeks were rough because we did not have water aerobics and many things were happening, but this week went better. I am starting to see some more definition in my arms after prioritizing my upper body and that’s pretty cool. Here are my stickers including two weeks of a shameful single sticker each (the stickers themselves aren’t shameful of course. They rule).

a very sparkly unicorn sticker in my planner
Sticker for week of August 17
a pink and orange stegosaurus sticker in my planner
sticker for week of August 31
Stickers in my planner including a cat holding a leaf, a witch cat riding a broom, a screaming opossum, and a croissant
stickers week of August 31

Kitchen Witchery

I made a few good meals recently. We had some kung pao tofu (from Bean by Bean) and the sauce came out with a satisfyingly glossy finish. On Friday, I made tri tip along with mashed potatoes, green beans, and cornbread. Finally, because I realized I’d gone nearly the whole summer with nary a rice krispie treat, I made a batch of those, which we have been enjoying.

a bowl of tofu and green beans in a glossy sauce on top of rice
kung pao tofu
a plate of tri tip, green beans, mashed potatoes, and cornbread
tritip dinner
a pan of rice krispie treats with mini marshmallows studded throughout and topped with colorful sprinkles
just a rice krispie treat with rainbow sprinkles

Cat Therapy

Fritz has been on a crime spree of escalating severity. He simply won’t stop peeing on the floor. Yes, he has a vet appointment this week. No, he is not marking. This has been going on for a while but over the last month he’s really ramped up and, I gotta tell you, we’re fucking losing it over here. We have tried many things. Fritz will often go pee in the box if I go with him to the bathroom, but just as often he will purposely wait until he is not being observed then race off to pee on the floor. We are willing to try any potential solution. Kirk just bought some cat litter made out of tofu (please do not ask me for information because I have none) and I bought a fake grass pad that people use for potty training dogs. We also tried just leaving an empty litter box out in case he is having sensory issues with cat litter on the whole (my autistic son) and he has peed in there but is still using the floor as an all-purpose toilet. Everyone needs to send cosmic emanations of support because we cannot continue like this.

Finally, here are some photos of a cat that is getting on my nerves (alas I still love him unconditionally).

Fritz the cat seen from above. He is lying very flat and long on the bed
long boi
Fritz the cat in a window, the photo is taken behind a curtain so we can see him. He is giving an intense look towards the camera
blue steel
Fritz the cat on the windowsill in my office, looking outside thoughtfully
pensive
Fritz the cat with his head and shoulders hidden behind towels hanging from the towel rack. The rest of his body is clearly visible
very good hiding place
Fritz the cat with his front paws on the windowstill and his back legs folded under him on the bed's headboard
that’s one way to do it

weekly update

Three Weeks in the Life: August 23, 2026

Posted on by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. I told myself I was going to write a post last week even though my sister was here for the weekend, but that clearly didn’t work out! So enjoy this rare “three weeks in the life” post instead. My sister Mia is currently waiting to start a new job so I suggested she come see me for a little bit. We spent last weekend chilling and it was nice! She wanted to pet Fritz a lot and he kept letting her come in for some pets and then, halfway through, would realize she is not me and panic, which was amusing.

I almost forgot to take a photo of us together. We only got this one right before I took her back to the airport. Photographic evidence: check.

My sister and I smiling at the camera
Mia and I

Current Events

I have been very busy this month on the DeFlock beat! I’ve been doing a lot of work with my local group, DeFlock Elk Grove, since April when I went to tell the city council not to expand its Flock contract (they did not listen to me). In case anyone is new here: Flock is a company that provides automated license plate readers (ALPRs) and an AI-powered service that law enforcement agencies can use to track people (there are other companies that do this, but Flock is the most prominent right now). It’s all very ugly. This week, Wired published an article about the code Flock uses and the kind of things users can ask it to do, including things like counting “how often other plates appear at the same cameras within a two-minute window of the target by default.” Police use this system without levying charges at anyone or getting a warrant.

me, smiling at the camera. I am wearing makeup, which I rarely do
glammed up for the news

Using data from a public records request, we released a community audit that showed what kind of searches Elk Grove’s data were appearing in. My job this month has been to communicate with the press and I have been extremely surprised at the response! I emailed our press release to a bunch of local media contacts and basically thought, we’ll that’s the end of that. Incorrect! Our local paper, Elk Grove News covered our audit in detail, then I did an interview with the Sacramento Bee about the audit, which was cool. Next, I did an on-camera news interview, which I think is even cooler! Here’s the video and here’s an accompanying article.

From there, I guess word got out to local reporters that I am willing to chat with them. I’m also connected to some of the other regional DeFlock groups and sometimes they ask if anyone is available to talk to a reporter. I always say yes because I want to make sure someone is out there saying “this sucks and we hate it” on the record. To that end, I commented on a local story from Galt in which the cops seemed to be posting sponsored content for Flock about how they used the system to catch a suspect quickly. I talked to ABC about Flock’s new “safeguards,” but barely got any airtime. (By the way, these safeguards are trash and perhaps fake given that a Flock spokesperson this week let slip that the company retains data indefinitely). I also provided a basic comment for a recent Sacramento News & Review article. This last week, I’ve been talking to reporters a lot for pieces about vandalism of Flock cameras (which, by the way, are not full of copper, gold, or other valuable metals. If you cut one down, it’s gotta be for the love of the game [I am not publicly endorsing said game!]). I did two Zoom interviews, but for one I didn’t make the cut (my views are too nuanced!) and for the other, the reporter said he had to move to a different story for that day but he was hoping to use my comments later. Just yesterday I talked to the Sacramento Bee about ALPR vandalism in Folsom, and those comments did make the edit.

crude line drawing of the panopticon with a stick figure wearing headphones and working a DJ setup in the center with the caption "DJ set at the panopticon would go crazy"
Unfortunately, I can’t stop thinking about this meme

I think the camera vandalism is particularly interesting. I thought having these cameras all over the place was supposed to “prevent crime” (lol). Of course, cameras don’t prevent crime, merely record what they see. It seems really easy for news agencies to latch on to these vandalism stories because it’s something tangible. Minor property damage! What a horror! Meanwhile, California law SB 34 stipulates that California agencies cannot share ALPR data with anyone outside of the state. Yet, based on the DeFlock Elk Grove audit, that seems to be what is happening here. I would argue that the whole Flock system is built to enable out-of-state sharing and anyone claiming otherwise is making shit up to close the deal. It’s the old the purpose of a system is what it does. If Flock isn’t supposed to violate our laws and our privacy rights, why is it constantly doing exactly that as if it were designed for this express purpose? It’s much harder for reporters to make that story legible to readers in 800 or fewer words because you can’t see the data moving from place to place. You have to think about spreadsheets and user interfaces and most people check out.

This stuff is so worrying and, as fired up as people are getting, I am not convinced it’s enough yet. 404 Media recently reported that the government is monitoring anti-Flock social media accounts. Are they using Flock to track the movements of people who oppose mass surveillance? When we’re already dealing with ICE detaining people (or just fucking executing them!) for nothing at all and an administration that sees no problem with punishing political opponents, the absolute worst thing to do is buy into the panopticon. I’m tired of people arguing that mass surveillance makes us “safer” when we have ample evidence that it’s making people less safe every day. Cops are using this to stalk women, and there are at least 50 cases of this that we know of. I simply cannot imagine how the alleged benefits of the system that watches everyone come and go, gathers identifying data about our cars, their drivers, and even the devices inside, and makes it trivially easy for men to stalk women is a net good on safety. Not in this benighted society.

If you’re local, please try to come out and comment at the city council meeting this Wednesday, August 26. We’re using the open comment period to let the city council know that this has to stop. Spread the word!

A flyer asking people to comment at the August 26 Elk Grove City Council meeting against Flock and ALPRs
Come speak out against ALPRs at the city council meeting this week!

Books and Other Words

book cover for The Witch Roads shown in greyscale on kobo ereader
The Witch Roads

We can always count on Kate Elliott to get us lusting after a man in some kind of weird-ass magical situation and The Witch Roads is no exception. Our protagonist, Deputy Courier Elen, gets caught up in some palace drama when one of the Tranquil Empire’s princes shows up in her backwater town and starts making demands. The prince ends up getting possessed by a magical entity that is supposed to stand guard against the rise of now-mythical sorcerer kings from another age. High jinks ensue? Elen leads the prince and his party through a not very well-known mountain pass and, in the process, gets pretty flirty with the magical entity who has taken over the prince’s corporeal form (however the entity is unwilling to kiss or more while wearing someone else’s body. We all have our limits). Why are we rooting for a guy who doesn’t even have a body? Kate Elliott, you madwoman. This is one of those very rich fantasy stories that’s impossible to describe in under three paragraphs, so you kind of just have to trust me here. I enjoyed this book very much and I’m currently halfway through this duology’s sequel The Nameless Land.


Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • Anthropic’s Text Watermarking Proves AI Companies Do Not Care at All About Writing via 404 Media. Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI, has made it their official position that words don’t matter. As someone whose whole job can basically be summed up by the idea “words have specific meanings,” I do take offense. As a form of “watermarking” a text, their system will select replace certain words with similar words to indicate that the text came from their LLM. As the article notes, this “shows how little they actually care about writing.” Yep.
  • College Men’s Propensity for Sexual Aggression and Perceived Justifications for Sexual Aggression Toward a Heterosexual or Bisexual College Woman via the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. So, past research has shown that bisexual women are more likely to report sexual assault than heterosexual women and this new study is looking into one reason why that could be. They found that men seem to be more hostile towards women who they perceive as being more “sexually available” (aka bisexuals). “These findings suggest that particular traits associated with sexual aggression may predispose men to misperceive cues of bisexual women’s sexual disinterest and judge bisexual women as more sexually available relative to heterosexual women.” Gross.
  • Temperature Zero for Culture: Why Everything Is Starting to Look the Same via Lauren’s data Substack. In short: everyone is using algorithms to determine the most likely thing that people will spend money on. Of course, driving everything to “most likely” means we’re living in a world of whimsy-less mediocrity. From the article:

Once prediction shapes the choices in front of us, we lose the ability to tell the difference between what people wanted and what the system made easy to want. If an algorithm feeds me Scandinavian crime dramas for ten years because I once watched two, my viewing history becomes airtight evidence that I love Scandinavian crime dramas. Admittedly, I have watched two Scandinavian crime dramas in my life. Netflix has since decided this is my entire personality. We risk mistaking a world shaped by prediction for a world shaped by preference, and the more these systems decide what survives, the more power moves from the people choosing among options to the systems deciding which options get a chance to be chosen.

Languages

For my fake masters degree in Spanish, this week I started reading Los Combatientes by Cristina Morales. I was working on some Sor Juana, but decided I might be better off starting with some more recent literature and working backwards. To go with the current reading, I translated the author’s Wikipedia page into English. This woman in particular sounds really fucking cool and I wish we could hang out, but I’ll have to settle for reading her work and tending her Wikipedia page. I also translated the page for her best-known work Lectura fácil, which I am now really looking forward to reading because it sounds very interesting too! This book isn’t on any of the reading lists I compiled from various masters in Spanish programs, but the good thing is I am not bound to a university and I can do whatever I want. The whole point of my fake masters degree was to get me inspired and working towards something with the language again, so it seems to be working perfectly.

Moving It

I think I’m missing one of these since this is a “three weeks” post, but it’s too late now! I’ve been doing my best while being busy, getting in my pool time and another workout. This last week, my water aerobics classes were unexpectedly canceled, and there’s no class next week, so hopefully I will find the motivation to do some exercise at home (and it won’t be too hot!)

stickers in my planner featuring a flower on roller skates, an ice cream sandwich, and a unicorn with an ice cream cone
Stickers week of July 26
my planner with stickers of a dolphin, a grumpy cartoon cat with flowers, and a pudding of some sort
stickers for week of August 3

Kitchen Witchery

I guess the recent dinner theme has been “beans and stuff with cheese on top.” There are worse ways to live! We had cheesy gnocchi with corn and pesto. I made this a month or two ago, but this time I added chickpeas and that turned it into a good meal. Kirk said I should make it again, which is one of his high compliments. I did a similar recipe with black beans, corn, and linguica. This is based on something from The Bean Book, but I added the sausage and skipped baking eggs into it, as the recipe suggests, because I am an egg-hater. Finally, I realized I had puff pastry in the freezer and free will, so I rolled up a sheet with a bunch of cheese and baked that in the oven. It was a very nice snack.

a skillet of beans, corn, and sausage baked with a bunch of cheese on top
bean and corn skillet
a bowl of corn, gnocchi, and chickpeas with pesto, topped with melty cheese
corn, gnocchi, and chickpeas in pesto
puff pastry rolled up with cheese and baked
puff pastry cheese things

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat inside a blanket, he is peeking out suspiciously
blanket cave enthusiast
Fritz the cat, eyes very alert, with his side molded into a pile of freshly laundered bedsheets
hug your warm sheets close
Fritz the cat in the middle of a disheveled comforter, yawning big and showing his fangs
dracula >:D
Fritz the cat, lying on his side on the floor, his string toy in front of him. He looks fucking goofy
I don’t even know what this pose is
Fritz the cat looking out the window. Photo shows his head and shoulders, with a faint reflection of his face in the window
when will my reflection show who I am inside?
weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: August 2, 2026

Posted on by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. I hope everyone is surviving the heat. Saturday reached an ungodly temperature like 105 Fahrenheit and unfortunately it’s probably going to be the same thing today. I am staying inside, reading my books, so I can come back next time and tell you about the books I read.

Books and Other Words

cover for Red Smoking Mirror shown on kobo ereader
Red Smoking Mirror

Red Smoking Mirror by Nick Hunt is an alternate history in which representatives of the Caliphate of Córdoba reached North America instead of the Spaniards and Christopher Columbus (indeed, in this version of reality, the Caliphate lasted long enough to send an expedition in the 15th century and didn’t get absorbed into Spain). It’s a fascinating premise and I especially liked it because Andalusian Spain is one of my favorite historical periods. The story focuses on Eli Ben Abram, a Jewish man who is living in Tenochtitlan some 25 or 30 years after leading the expedition to the New Maghrib (that is, the new west). He has married Malinala, who is more commonly known to in our timeline La Malinche, the wife of Hernán Cortés. The story moves slowly, focusing on the atmosphere and painting the picture of these Moors mixing with the various indigenous Mexican peoples. Hunt doesn’t take the position that the Muslims making contact with the West first would result in less bloodshed. In fact, as the novel progresses, we see the scourge of smallpox making itself known. The plot ultimately centers around incursions by another group from Al-Andalus that is less interested in trade than conquest. One aspect of this book I really liked was Hunt’s choices with the language. Instead of using typical English spellings for places and things, he filters concepts through Arabic or keeps indigenous terms. For example, the Yucatan is “Yuqqatan,” and Cuba is “Quba,” while chocolate is the Nahuatl(ish) “xocholotl.” Anyway, this is a book perfectly catered to things I find interesting! Thank you, Nick Hunt.

More Dungeon Crawler Carl

hardcover book: The Gate of the Feral Gods. Cover features Carl and Princess Donut leaping away from an exploding plane
The Gate of the Feral Gods

The Gate of the Feral Gods is the fourth book in Matt Dinniman’s Dungeon Crawler Carl series. I listened to the first three books with Kirk in May when we drove to Seattle (see this post), but now I am reading words on the page as I normally do, although I am glad I listened to the first few books because the audiobook narrator imbued everyone with so much personality that I have brought it with me to my own reading. What I enjoyed about the other books I enjoyed about this one: Carl remains committed to getting himself and as many people out of this spectacle of carnage as possible. He also continues building increasingly wild contraptions, although this certainly seems to be encouraged by the game/the game’s AI because Carl keeps receiving objects that can be made into contraptions. I guess we love to watch an engineer work! Something else I’m enjoying about this story is that Carl has access to a secret item called The Dungeon Anarchist’s Cookbook, which contains notes from dungeon crawlers from previous seasons. This places him in a lineage of rebels who raged against the machine, and Carl is able to surreptitiously incorporate their observations into his activities as he tries to survive. One thing I am curious about for the next four books in the series (so far) is how Dinniman plans to raise the stakes—they’re already very high. In this episode (spoilers), Carl ends up summoning a god. Like, what more crazy shit can they even get into (I’m sure I’ll be schooled soon).

book: The Butcher's Masquerade. Cover features the cat Princess Donut wearing a tiara, sunglasses, and a wireless mic
The Butcher’s Masquerade

Indeed, I was soon schooled because I continued with the next book in the series, The Butcher’s Masquerade. In this floor of the dungeon, the crawlers are joined by normal people who can pay to enter the dungeon and play the game themselves, so Carl et al. are fighting on multiple fronts. Dinniman maintained his commitment to tomfoolery while continuing to raise the stakes and rail against the the rich people profiting from human misery. Yes, it is bad that they’re fighting for their lives, but it’s also funny that they have to get an allosaurus named Big Tina to do a dance recital. My favorite silly thing was Princess Donut’s crush, a cat she calls Ferdinand (government name: Gravy Boat) being the pet of an elf queen. Everyone was making fun of his hat, but Ferdinand told them it was his “royal hat” and it made him the most handsome boy in the castle. This is probably how Fritz would sound if granted the ability to speak. I’ve got the next two Carl books on hold from the library, but I’m betting it will be another month before I get them in my hands.

Family Abolition

book: Family Abolition. Cover is a pink-to-blue color gradiant
Family Abolition

Family Abolition: Capitalism and the Communizing of Care by M. E. O’Brien gave me a lot to think about. You might see that title and be wondering why anyone would want to abolish a family (and to any suspicious parents reading this, it doesn’t mean never talk to your immediate family again). Here’s O’Brien’s definition of the concept:

Family abolition is a commitment to making the care necessary for human flourishing freely available throughout society. Rather than relying on one’s immediate personal relationships, access to care should be built into the social fabric of our collective lives.

Essentially, the concept of the nuclear family, around which Western cultures have organized, limit people’s access to care and puts a ceiling on our ability to organize a classless society. O’Brien starts by discussing some critical issues with family, like the fact that “children are more likely to be traumatically harmed, raped, or killed by a family member in their household than anyone else” and “…55 percent of women murdered in the United States were killed by current or former partners.” Children in particular have highly limited options. If you get born into or marry into a shitty family—however you want to define that—there’s not a lot you can do about it.

Despite their flaws, O’Brien notes that “for most people the family is the closest thing we ever come to experiencing unconditional love and support.” There is no other widespread mechanism in our society for making sure people get love and care. However, family abolition would ensure that “the care we all need abundantly available beyond the family.” This would apply to all stages of life, not just childhood, and would help relieve the burden on romantic partners or children when it comes to, for example, elder care. O’Brien also refutes the queer concept of “chosen family” as a replacement for the nuclear family. Although the chosen family is getting a lot of us through this life, it does require that someone chooses you, which makes survival “bound up with the status and the opinions of others”—exactly the thing family abolition is trying to avoid.

Ultimately, O’Brien concludes that part of abolishing the family would be “overcoming class society.” However, we have no idea what that would look like and this is not something that can be accomplished without totally rebuilding how our society is structured. Still, family abolition is a framework we can use when organizing and agitating for the future we want, providing “a commitment to care for all, an answer to the plea for love.”

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • AI Companies Are Buying Antique Books, Ingesting Their Contents to Train Models, and Then Destroying Them at Incredible Scale via Futurism. Call me a degenerate socialist if you must, but I think humanity’s literary output should belong to humanity and not a few random “AI” companies that are stealing all our work and selling it back to us. They couldn’t even be bothered to find a way to do this without destroying the books or at least preserving the text for people to enjoy. Fuck off.
  • Influencers Are Being Paid to Spread the Mormon Church’s Gospel via Bloomberg. Nothing about this surprises me because I grew up being told that we were all ambassadors for the church and any relationship was a missionary opportunity (gross). Of course they’re using social media influencers to push Mormonism. The whole conceit of social media is you can show yourself in your best light (if you so choose) and Mormons thrive on that shit. While we’re here, did you know they are letting the Mormon girls wear tank tops now? Even at BYU? I didn’t even get to the magic underwear stage of the religion but I was told in no uncertain terms that I couldn’t let my shoulders show because it would lead the boys to sin (no comment on whether I’m causing the girls to “stumble,” but I have my suspicions). I got told I couldn’t eat in the cafeteria at BYU because my shorts were too short and now they just … wear tank tops?
  • The Gen Alpha Melody via Carl E. Martin. I was fascinated by this video about the “Gen Alpha” melody, a sequence that’s been appearing in a large number of new songs. I am not sure if I’m just getting old and not paying attention to pop music, but I feel like a lot of it sounds the same and this video made me feel validated. It also made me think of the Four Chord Song, which the author also cites as a sort of millenial version of this phenomenon, even though it’s not quite the same concept.

Media

Real Infowars is making me feel sane. No, not that Infowars. The Onion bought Alex Jone’s Infowars in a court-mandated auction to pay damages to “the more than $1 billion in damages he owes the families” of the Sandy Hook massacre. The new Infowars (going by “Real Infowars”) so hilarious and deeply cathartic to watch. These people have clearly studied the right-wing media ecosystem and have figured out a way to satirize it that is actually funny. The weekly broadcast includes an opening song, the “Jim Haggerty Show”, the Alex Jones parody program “Emergency”, and the most unhinged fake advertisements to ever grace the internet. I think it’s been really hard to find a way to communally acknowledge how insane everything is now. I mean, we all feel insane but seeing someone lampooning it so brilliantly feels really good. Tim Heidecker, the mastermind behind Real Infowars, did an interview with Wired where he said that “just acknowledging the insanity is enough to make people feel like there’s a community of sanity … out there.” And YEAH, that’s exactly it. This is why we need art and it’s why we need comedy. So I hope you’ll all start watching with me. How else will you find out about the amazing medical benefits of FISH MILK?

Icelandic

I am proud to announce my latest Wikipedia efforts: articles on próventa in English and Icelandic. I came across this term a few times while translating some articles from Icelandic and the dictionary was not very helpful. Icelandic Wikipedia had a two-sentence article and I said, that sucks, I could do it better. So I did. I read some Icelandic sources on the subject, wrote an article in English, then translated it. I reviewed the translation with my teacher then went back and made sure I had my facts straight in English. And there you have it!

Moving It

The struggle to workout beyond going to water aerobics continues. Two weeks ago I threw up so hard that my diaphragm was sore for several days and that really put a damper on wanting to exercise. Now it’s hot again. I anxiously await the end of summer.

stickers in my planner featuring a bird riding a turtle, pistols, and a fat raccoon
Stickers week of July 13
my planner with stickers of a fat bird, a magical bowl of soup, and a prickly red cat
Stickers, week of July 20

Kitchen Witchery

I have not been cooking much that is interesting to share here, but I did revisit the “almost alfredo” broccoli and chickpea recipe. I chose to strip out as much effort as possible to make it for lunch this week; no chopping, just tossing in a bag of frozen broccoli and using powdered garlic and onion instead of their fresh counterparts. I also added a bag of tortellini. Recommended! I checked out Salty Cheesy Herby Crispy Snackable Bakes (what a long-ass title) from the library and tried the salt-and-pepper biscuit recipe to go with some leftover soup. I liked this recipe because it’s a cream biscuit so I didn’t have to deal with working in the butter, which made my life easier. The flavor was good too. Lastly, I present a truly perfect chicken quesadilla. It deserves to be admired.

a bowl of chickpeas, tortellini, and broccoli in creamy sauce
chickpeas, tortellini, and broccoli
a pan of salt and pepper biscuits
salt and pepper biscuits
a delightfully browned and oozing quesadilla cooking in a frying pan
perfect quesadilla

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat on Kirk's desk, shoving his paw down the hole for threading your cables through
Chief Inspector Fritz
Fritz the cat lounging on the dinning table on on his side, catching the bright afternoon sun
Here for the sun
Fritz the cat looking out the window at night
Night watch
Fritz the cat lounging in a pile of my clothes in the closet. His expression is unrepentant.
Sure, I guess that’s fine

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: July 19, 2026

Posted on by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. Sometimes I sit down to write my blog and I find myself wondering if I did anything at all in the last 14 days. Clearly I have; the business of being alive alone takes up a lot of my time, but I think the hot weather has had me just lounging around for the most part. I’m have been reading, studying my languages, and things of that nature, but some weeks, there’s just not a lot to say about it all! That said, please enjoy this short post.

Books and Other Words

book cover for They Feywild Job
The Feywild Job

The Feywild Job is ostensibly a Dungeons and Dragons novel, and I don’t totally know what that means except it seemed to have some bearing on the setting and the characters have fanciful last names related to their abilities like “Charmhand” or “Redsong.” That said, I have loved everything I’ve read from C.L. Polk (see Witchmark and The Midnight Bargain) and I do love books about magical gay people, so I figured this would probably worth reading even without having much interest in D&D. In this story, the protagonist Saeldian Charmhand is a con artist who gets drawn into a heist job with the ex-boyfriend they haven’t spoken to in a decade, Kell Redsong. Saelidan has spent years perfecting their illusion magic, granted to them by a fairy patron, who they encounter in the second part of the heist when they have to go into the fairylands. I am not going to try to describe this book because every word I put down sounds wackier than the last but I did love it and it was very sweet and fun to read. I recommend it!

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • The end of the working writer via Is It Supposed to Look Like That? This article gut punched me with this observation: “Sometimes, I think we as writers overestimate how much people care about the quality of writing outside of specific venues like fiction, criticism, and narrative journalism. But the balance of written words produced in the world are not valued for their quality, but rather for their existence.” My job is to care about words and my hobbies also involve caring about words, but unfortunately, many people don’t care very much and just having some text, even if it is, to my eyes, bad, is fine. That’s a part of why LLMs are getting so much traction.
  • Air Force Engineer Accused of Cutting Down 13 Police Cameras Says They’re Unconstitutional via Military.com. Good for him.
  • I can’t imagine this being exciting news for any of my readers, but I was very excited about this. My Icelandic teacher Robert showed me Morgunstund.net, which has an Icelandic copycat of NYT’s Connections game (here: Tengingar) and another word-based guessing game. I love a word game so this is going to be fun and educational for me.

Moving It

I am very proud to report that my bar hang is improving. I held on for about five to ten seconds on a lighter band. I’ve been doing one hang on the medium band and then one on the light band for the last week or so. Being able to hang independently from the bar is finally starting to feel possible instead of just something I’m going to be working on forever.

Me hanging from the bar, my back to the camera. I am partially supported by a relatively thin resistance band
light support for the bar hang!

Here are the recent stickers. Four workouts in a week is seeming like the limit, but I am trying to convince myself to at least do a little stationary bike time on a fifth day. However, this may not be possible for me until the summer is over.

Stickers in my planner featuring an angry cartoon cat, a seal reading a book, a gameboy stylized with bunny ears, and a cat holding a book
Stickers week of June 29
stickers in my planner featuring an ice cream sundae, a magical book pile, sparkly moons, and a glittery little bird
stickers for the week of July 6

Kitchen Witchery

At my last trip to the farmers market, I bought a bunch of corn, green beans, and a merely reasonable (instead of excessive) quantity amount of squash. I had some potatoes to use too so I made a shepherd’s pie but with beans, since I had some in the freezer. I mixed the beans with some frozen corn, peas, and carrots, and a bit of green beans, then mixed that with seasonings and a packet of brown gravy. Et voila. We had corn and asparagus pasta with ricotta, which is a summer favorite, along with some chicken for which I used the marinade from this kebab recipe (but obviously did not make kebabs) and it was quite good. I made everyone’s favorite corn soup from Decolonize Your Diet. The only change I make to this recipe is to blend the whole thing because I have learned that I do not enjoy chunks of a lot of types of vegetables.

As far as treats are concerned, I made the carrot cake muffin from 100 Morning Treats, but I have never met a muffin recipe that I didn’t want to tamper with so I added cinnamon bits. I skipped the frosting the recipe calls for (I love frosting but I didn’t want frosted muffins aka … cake?) and added a little streusel instead. I also made this zucchini cake which was very easy and successful. Cake is such a great way to eat more vegetables.

a bowl of beans and vegetables in brown gravy, topped with mashed potatoes and cheese
shepherd’s pie but beans
a plate of datilini pasta mixed with corn and asparagus and topped with a big dollop of ricotta. There's some chicken on the side
corn and asparagus pasta with ricotta
a bowl of corn soup alongside a grilled cheese
corn soup and grilled cheese
12 muffins cooling on a wire rack. They are golden with crumbly oat streusel on top
carrot muffins with streusel topping
a zucchini sheet cake with cream cheese frosting. A slice of cake is on a plate with the remaining cake in the background
zucchini cake with cream cheese frosting

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat in the windowsill. It is mostly dark and the camera has imbued him with glowing demonic eyes
demon mode
Fritz the cat turned away from the camera. He is inside his carrier, which is under an end table. The table is in a corner and blankets cover one side
Fritz in his cave
Fritz the cat on the bed. His ears are perked up and he's looking towards the camera. His front feet are tucked under his chest.
chilling in bed
weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: July 5, 2026

Posted on by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. I’ve been continuing my experiment of blocking (almost) every account that advertises to me on instagram. I was truly unprepared for how quickly the ads would get completely insane.

a collage of bonkers instagram ads I've gotten recently, including multiple bible apps, a dashcam company, a porch goose, tallow, sugar, GLP-1 medication, and a porch goose
What is happening

I can’t emphasize enough how much I hate advertisements. I am trying to live but I am constantly subject to the cacophony of ads and it takes up my limited mental and sensory energy. We are all being psychically assaulted. This little experiment has really made me think about how much of a waste social media can be. These ads are so jarring that it’s now uncomfortable to browse my feed.

After I got through all the influencer ladies selling me clothes from Walmart (actually some of those are still popping up. They are legion), instagram I guess assumed I should get ads they normally send to straight men about sports betting and dash cams. Once I dispatched those, the Christianity began. I’ve gotten a ton of ads for Christian products, Bible apps, and simply Israel (a primarily Jewish nation but, of course, the site of a lot of Christian belief). I was particularly puzzled by an ad for an app that says “You have 47 Bible apps on your phone. They don’t have one verse in their language.” The “them” is two African men in some form of traditional dress. Is that a problem that keeps coming up? That you might meet someone and not have the Bible ready in their language? Do you think what these guys really need is The Bible? Then started receiving a lot of ads for semaglutide medication (like Ozempic), which pisses me off in particular because I know that, at least at one point, Instagram had a setting to disable any ads related to weight loss and I did have that turned on. I’m not sure if they retired the setting or I broke it. Finally, I’ve landed in some weird conservative “wellness” space. It’s showing me ads for tallow-based beauty products and—bizarre by even these standards—some ad asking “what would happen if you put castor oil in your belly button for 30 nights?” I don’t know, girl, I would probably feel greasy?? Another ad that made me be like “I just have to log off” is one that reads “I don’t have all the answers. But I think more boys raised shirtless outdoors with guns would help.” Help WHAT exactly???

I’m not going to complain about my personal instagram ad apocalypse again (probably), but I do think it’s worth considering how much stuff we don’t even want to see that we’re beaming into our brains. Not even just stuff we disagree with or from other perspectives but true fucking garbage. There’s no way the lady asking what might happen if we apply castor oil to our navels has anything worthwhile to offer us. It’s a garbage heap, but we all go hang out at the dump every day because it’s somehow the best place to find fun and interesting things to share with our friends and we can always find a spot to hang up our best photos amid the detritus of human civilization. It’s a drag that the internet has so many cool things and has such potential to connect us, but we’re drowning in the stupidest advertisements that humanity can conceive of just because a few people decided that the internet’s whole scaffolding would be made of ad money and propelled by whatever can grab a viewer’s attention, worthwhile or not. The twenty-first century sucks so far.

Books and Other Words

ebook cover of The Telling
The Telling

I wrapped up Le Guin-fest 2026 (for now?) with the last book in the Hainish Cycle, The Telling. This story focuses on Sutty, a woman from Earth who has traveled to another planet, Aka, to be an “observer,” a person who gets to know the local culture and report back to the Eukmen (a loose confederation of planets). Sutty’s Earth is under the thumb of a totalitarian, patriarchal regime, so she joins the diplomatic corps as a means of escape. Unfortunately, by the time she arrives on Aka (decades later thanks to the time it takes to travel through space), they too have suffered a takeover but in the form of an obsessively corporatized society in which nothing works right and all of the old ways have been banned. For the first part of the story, I wasn’t sure I had it in me to read about a woman dealing with living in an authoritarian, capitalist system (haven’t we seen enough?), but as the story progresses, Sutty gets an opportunity to go to the countryside and observe people who covertly maintain their old ways, a system of being called The Telling. This story doesn’t culminate in a big moment of standing up to the oppressor; it’s a much quieter story. The book itself even tangentially mentions that one might expect something grander. Later in the story, when Sutty is traveling to a giant, hidden library in mountains not unlike our Himalayas, she expects to find some kind of temple adorned with colorful flags, but instead finds a cave system where visitors pitch their tents and read as much of the literature of The Telling as they can before the season changes and they have to make their way back down the mountains. It is, as I’m realizing Le Guin’s work is in general, a tale to get us reflecting on our relationship to truth and how we form and perpetuate the stories about who we are.

book: The Elusive Body
The Elusive Body

The Elusive Body: Patients, Doctors, and the Diagnosis Crisis by Alexandra Sifferlin was genuinely irritating me by the end. The book’s premise is an interesting one: why can’t doctors diagnosis people more accurately? It’s a question that’s certainly on my mind. The book opens with an unusual medical case and talks about the NIH’s Undiagnosed Disease Program, which is genuinely cool. Unfortunately, the book never really settles on a coherent narrative. Sifferlin is a reporter for The New York Times and her newspaper experience is evident in the way she writes. Most of the book seems like it comes in article-length chunks that don’t always connect. Sifferlin repeatedly writes compelling hooks, introduces new characters, then kinda forgets about them when she finishes making the point, in contrast to what we might expect from narrative non-fiction, in which the author uses one or several real-life cases to help the reader relate to the information as we move through the work.

I didn’t really notice things going off the rails until the chapter on overdiagnosis. My hackles were up as soon as Sifferlin brought up autism because why only bring it up during a chapter on people (allegedly) getting diagnosed too much? She references a 2011 study from South Korea in which “researchers found that 2.6 percent of the population met the criteria for a diagnosis despite not having one,” noting that this “suggests that many people in other populations, though undiagnosed, would still meet the American criteria for an autism diagnosis.” Now, I’m not a doctor, but I think if people are meeting the diagnostic criteria for something and are not diagnosed, that actually means we are underdiagnosing something, not overdiagnosing. But what do I know. The next chapter was almost exclusively about AI and, had I not been so near the end of the book, I would have stopped right then and there. I know I have a (deserved) reputation as an AI hater, but I can admit there are legitimate uses for specific AI in medicine. However, Sifferlin spent the whole chapter focused on only Chat-GPT, a large language model that puts words together by predicting their most likely sequence. It has no relationship to actual sources or information, so telling us that this might “one day” be the future of diagnosis neither comforts nor cheers me. The chapter uses a lot of conditional language, talking about what “could” or “might” happen, which means Sifferlin has spent over ten percent of this book (and this is the book’s longest chapter!) on technology that is not yet delivering on its promises. After spending the rest of the book talking about factors that make accurate diagnosis difficult—doctors’ communication skills and biases, training and testing, the pressures of the insurance system—it seems like a waste to end with what appears to be an infomercial for a technology that is going to do a worse job than doctors, despite their flaws.

ebook cover for Platform Decay
Platform Decay

Martha Wells’ Platform Decay is the eighth installment in the Murderbot series, which follows a sec unit (a human/robot hybrid that a company owns and leases to protect human clients) who managed to hack its programming and liberate itself. Though Sec Unit (as most people call it; “Murderbot,” as it calls itself) didn’t really do anything with its freedom for years except privately watch TV and keep doing its job, until it met its current group of humans, of whom it is fiercely protective. In Platform Decay, Murderbot and fellow liberated bot, Three, go to a huge space station to rescue their favorite human’s family members. Chaos ensues. One of the funniest details of this book is that Three is off-screen passing the code for bot liberation to everyone it meets, which we know because one of these liberated bots then runs into Murderbot and tries to share the code, but Murderbot tells it to fuck off and make better fashion decisions. I wish we had a story from Three’s perspective too because the memes people have been making about Three’s possible adventures are very funny.

ebook cover for El vampiro de la colonia Roma
El vampiro de la colonia Roma

Finally, I finished a book in Spanish that I’ve been reading on and off for a while: El vampiro de la colonia Roma by Luis Zapata. This book was originally published in 1979 and I added it to my list after I learned of it when translating the Wikipedia article about LGBTQ literature in Mexico. Vampiro was one of the first Mexican books to openly discuss homosexuality. Although “vampire” is in the title (English: The Vampire of colonia Roma [colonia Roma is an area of Mexico City]), it’s not a book about the supernatural. The story follows a young male prostitute, nicknamed Adonis, going about his misadventures and trying to make a living. Please do not ask me for details because it’s kind of a blur. The story is written as if it’s transcribed from Adonis making a tape recording, telling the story of his life. There is literally zero punctuation in this thing and there’s a lot of slang or shortened words to represent the way someone actually talks. Once I got used to it, it wasn’t so bad but there was a steep learning curve. Something that made me laugh from this book was a scene where the protagonist was in a bathroom making little holes (literally. The Spanish is “agujeritos”) in bathroom walls and I said, hey, wait a minute … did I just learn the word for “glory hole” on context alone? When I started learning Spanish in high school, I never imagined this is where I would end up. Being alive is really something.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • Left in the dungeon: Are rumors of a leftist LitRPG genre more than fantasy? via the Oakland Review of Books. I was gratified to see this review of the Dungeon Carl Crawler series draw the same conclusions that I have about the series: it’s charming because it’s rooted in a form of collective solidarity. I also appreciated the discussion about the history of the genre and how it’s normally very libertarian, so Carl is an interesting departure.
  • The Tokenpocalypse Is Here: Companies Are Scrambling To Stop Spending So Much on AI via 404 Media. Predictable but still hilarious to see it happen. From the article, “Consulting giant Accenture is trying to figure out how to stop non-technical workers from blowing through companies’ AI token budget on trivial tasks like converting PDFs to presentation slides, according to leaked audio obtained by 404 Media.” lol. lmao even.
  • Reasonable Concerns via The Present Age. Parker Molloy summarizes a decade of increasing conservatism on gender expression, culminating in this week’s Supreme Court ruling that “state can decide who gets to play on a girls’ team based on what [Kavanaugh] called ‘biological sex,'” as a road paved with “reasonable concerns.” She notes, plenty of people with these “reasonable” concerns about trans people “treated those concerns as a reason to stay quiet while the restrictions piled up, on the assumption that this would all stop somewhere sensible.” Well, it hasn’t stopped anywhere sensible and is probably going to keep getting worse. I have stupidly not been as outspoken in favor of trans rights as I ought to have been in the past, and did briefly get taken in by the “reasonable concern” crowd in the mid-2010s. I will be clear now: Trans people aren’t bothering anyone. They are just people trying to get through this stupid life like the rest of us. Our government’s treatment of trans people is terrible and embarrassing, and they are using trans people as a stepping stone for greater oppression of women, girls, and the broader queer population. This shit is trash. Everyone who cares about human rights needs to oppose this.

Rampant Consumerism

a glass jar of roasted edamame, honey roasted peanuts, cheese crackers, and spiced pecans
the “just give me something to eat now” snack mix

Sometime before my instagram ad apocalypse, I was getting a bunch of ads for nuts.com and their custom trail mix. I do love snacks and customizing things so, unfortunately, that did work on me after sufficient exposures. It turned out I didn’t like their custom trail mix options, but I bout some pre-made mixes and I was inspired to simply buy some stuff and make my own mix. My current snack mix is honey roasted peanuts, roasted edamame, Annie’s cheddar bunnies (those are from the grocery store; I bought a cheese cracker snack from nuts dot com but didn’t love it in my mix), and sweet/spicy pecans. Alas, the pecans are a little too spicy for me so I am going to do something else in the next batch. I was also inspired by an instagram video I recently saw that said something like “I’m ADHD and put all the snacks I like in one jar so when I don’t know what to eat, I eat that.” Honestly, she’s a genius for that. I have been leaving this snack jar on the counter in sight so when I’m like “hungry!!!!” I can just go “oh good, a snack” and it helps a lot. Highly recommend for all my neurodivergent homies.

Languages

I mentioned last time that I have been feeling uninspired about my Spanish studies and I was trying to figure out what to do next. I do yearn for grad school, but only in a theoretical sense. I realized that grad school is probably 80 percent reading (the remaining 20 percent is writing and crying) and reading is free. Why not do a solo run of a masters in Spanish? I found a bunch of reading lists for Spanish masters programs online and I’m in the process of combining them into one big list and noting which books are the most recommended. I think what I want to do is take it one author at a time, read up on them, get into their work, translate or update any relevant Wikipedia articles about them, and of course write my opinions or findings on the blog. I’m starting with Sor Juana Inés because that’s as good a place to start as any. I am accepting that this will be a slow process. When I got my masters in library and information science, I did that shit in under two years but of course now I have many things going on and I want to take time to really engage with this stuff and not just check off a list that I read the books. I will report back.

Corporeal Form

I feel so stupid just figuring this out but I recently realized that I am fully lactose intolerant (warning: incoming TMI). I haven’t been able to drink milk without getting sick for years so I guess I knew I had some issues, but I have been eating cheese and other things without much trouble (I thought!). After recently eating a fettuccine alfredo that really made my stomach hurt, I said to myself, am I lactose intolerant? I ran a few experiments and, yes I am. Although cheese and stuff isn’t making me immediately throw up like milk might, it is definitely contributing to me having to poop all the damn time (like, four or more times daily). I have started eating less dairy or taking lactaid pills when I do eat dairy and I have been pooping way less, like twice per day. This rules. The only bad thing is now I’m trying to figure out how to reconfigure my diet and it is annoying.

Moving It

I realized I had been making my workouts rather harder than necessary because I thought I should be doing my physical therapy exercises plus whatever other stuff. But no, PT is a whole workout, at least with the exercises I have now. So instead of trying to do everything all the time, I am trying to do PT plus a little extra upper body stuff since I’ve decided I’m committed to making my shoulders swole as hell. It’s very hard to find the balance of doing enough and not overdoing it, especially because I feel a lot of anxiety that my arthritis, especially, will get worse if I don’t work out. I’m hoping this recent realization will help a little.

Here are the stickers I rewarded myself with for working out over the last two weeks!

stickers in my planner featuring a goose sweeping, a loaf of bread, a flower on roller skates, and a bisexual dragon
stickers week of June 15
stickers in my planner featuring a piñata, cat with a flower, a unicorn mermaid, and a magic salt shaker
stickers week of June 22

Kitchen Witchery

I made household favorite matar paneer (peas and cheese) from Classic Indian Cooking and we had that with a simple bean curry, which everyone liked, to round out the meal. I’ve been trying to use the large amount of squash I bought at the farmers market last week, so I roasted a bunch of yellow squash then mixed that with chickpeas, noodles, and feta for lunch over the last week. I still have some extra noodles and squash. I think I might blend the squash with some ricotta to make a little sauce. That sounds like it could be good.

We had a bunch of leftover egg whites because Kirk made lemon bars (no pictures. This isn’t Kirk’s blog!). I didn’t want them to go to waste so I whipped up a batch of meringues. I combined the recipes for chunky hazelnut meringues (for the mix-ins) and Vermont maple meringues (for the method and quantity of egg whites), and that worked really well. They are good! I also made a cinnamon roll focaccia, which was a delight. I like that you get all the essence of a cinnamon roll without having to fuck around rolling out the dough. Kirk said he liked them better than regular cinnamon rolls, but he is only so-so on cinnamon rolls, so it’s not as big of a compliment as it sounds like. Still, it is very good and I will make it again.

unattractive photo of peas and cheese, rice, and bean curry arranged on a plate but kind of mixed up in bad lighting
unattractive photo of peas and cheese, rice, and bean curry
a bowl of roasted yellow squash, chickpeas, feta, and ditalini noodles
summer lunch
hazlenut and chocolate chip merengues on a sheet pan. They are topped with hazelnut bits. They are not shaped in any fancy way, just plopped onto the pan
hazlenut and chocolate chip meringues
a batch of cinnamon roll focaccia, topped with cinnamon sugar and then a glaze
cinnamon roll focaccia
two pieces of cinnamon roll focaccia, showing the middle is full of cinnamon bits
cinnamon roll foccacia cross section

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat cuddling against my shoulder and chest and looking over his shoulder towards the camera
morning hang
Fritz the cat on top of the headboard looking all long and ready to run for it
ready to pounce
Fritz the cat sleeping on the bed. His head is resting on his paw
sleepy boy

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: June 21, 2026

Posted on by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. I have, in a rather short period of time, absolutely destroyed my instagram algorithm. Although, I should specify, I’ve specifically destroyed whatever they’re using to decide how to advertise to me. The regular, suggested posts algorithm (or, as I often like to call it, Al Gore’s Rhythm) seems to be functioning alright.

a collage of instagram ads plus a notice that instagram is disabling a privacy setting. Ads include some weird horse hat, a turnstile, protein sprinkles, and "become a zumba instructor"
make it stop

It started with a few things: a discussion with a friend about how I have hundreds of accounts blocked (I block a lot of corporations and celebrities) and then an ad for a turnstile that I think would be used in a stadium and another for some kind of horse headwear. Both of those ads made me laugh with how insane they were. I showed them to my sister and she said “they don’t know what to do with your ass” and she’s clearly right. I thought, if I block more stuff, my ads can only get funnier. I’ve never been so wrong.

The problem is that if I want to block an account that’s serving me an ad, I have to click over to their profile to do so. Instagram thinks this is an act of endorsement. You wanted to know more! You engaged with that account! More more more! So, I started out blocking a few corporations and influencer-type accounts but that put me on a horrible death spiral culminating in lowest common denominator ad content. Now I’m seeing an absolute shit-ton of AI-generated ads and companies that seem to have like five posts that are all AI and I’m not convinced any of them are selling real products. I’m also getting a lot of weird influencer ladies telling me about great apparel finds at Walmart this season. I keep blocking them but there seems to be an endless well of this crap at the end of the internet. Please find a real hobby, influencer ladies.

I was frustrated with the state of instagram even before this commercial hell of partially my own making. It seems like every third post is an advertisement. Many of the advertisements are made to look just like the things I actually want to see, and often lull me into watching a hated advertisement for much longer than I would like (amount of time I want to spend on ads: zero). In a certain light, getting the AI slopcalypse ads and the ladies with their boring outfits is a blessing. I know that shit isn’t for me. It bears no resemblance to the things I come for the internet for. Lately I’m on instagram to see people in clown outfits, women grandmasters defeating cocky and unsuspecting men at chess, and buff ladies explaining how to work out your arms and shoulders (buff ladies, thank you for your service). Unfortunately, I am constantly reminded that the infrastructure of this current incarnation of the internet does not love us or want us to see weird stuff, but it does want to trap us in the infinite shopping mall and trick us into thinking the mall is populated by people like us and full of products we just need.

One of the tools Meta uses to populate the infinite mall is its (lack of) privacy settings. A pop-up informed me recently that Meta will disable the setting to not be tracked elsewhere. From Meta’s statement on the subject, “we … will no longer offer the ‘Your activity off Meta technologies’ setting that lets you disconnect activity that businesses share with us from your account.” Even though I’m complaining about the crappy ads, I’m not doing so because I want more ads targeted to my interests. I want to look at the internet without constantly being advertised at. I don’t want every piece of information about where I go online to get fed into the big data machine that makes me buy stuff. I’m so sick of this model of the internet. I want to stop using social media altogether but my friends are there and I do really find cool stuff online, but the bullshit to interest ratio is getting way too high. I’m ready for the bottom to fall out on these business models so we can remake the internet in a much cooler way. In the meantime, I am unfortunately opening instagram way more times per day than I intend to in hopes of seeing something fun. Please remind me to log off if you see me.

Books and Other Words

paperback book: The Word for World is Forest. Cover features a dense forest
The Word for World is Forest

Le Guin-fest 2026 continues with The Word for World is Forest. In this installment, a team from Earth travels to a planet that is all forest (and ocean) to chop down trees and ship the wood back to Earth, which has totally depleted its resources (this seems prohibitively expensive but okay). The planet is, however, already inhabited by a forest-dwelling people called the Athsheans who are living in a way that the military and logging contingent from Earth don’t recognize as being sufficiently human, so they enslave the native population to help run their colony and the logging operation. Eventually, the Athsheans, who are not nearly as stupid as the men from Earth believe them to be, fight back and kill the “yumens,” although it is completely against their cultural mores to kill anyone at all. Given the 1972 publication date, I wondered if this story was meant to be an allegory about the Vietnam war and, according to the Wikipedia article (which is referencing books I don’t have immediate access to, otherwise I’d link that instead), it was. The other thing this book had me wondering was whether the Athsheans inspired Star Wars‘ ewoks because they are both small, furry people who live in a forest and we know George Lucas is just out here lifting ideas from anywhere (just ask anyone who’s read Dune lol). We can’t say for sure, but it does seem a little too on-the-nose to be pure coincidence. In any case, this book was good and interesting but didn’t permanently rewire my brain the way The Dispossessed did, but that’s a very high bar.

paperback book: Four Ways to Forgiveness. The cover is very boring and mostly white with a small picture of a crossroads
Four Ways to Forgiveness

I wasn’t sure about Four Ways to Forgiveness, the next book in Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle, at first but it absolutely grew on me as I read on (note: the link to the book is for Five ways to Forgiveness, an updated edition with an extra story). This is a collection of four not-exactly-short but not book-length stories, which was the first thing that put me off. I know short stories are great but it’s too much stopping and starting for me. I want to get into something and stay there. However, these four stories are each tales from people on two sister planets from the same solar system, Werel and Yeowe. The stories crisscross each other to create one powerful image of these worlds’ systems of oppression. On Werel, there is an owner class and an asset (read: slave) class, and some centuries ago, Werelians started shipping male assets to Yeowe to work in the mines. After being worked to death, the owners began to ship female assets too. Eventually, the women fomented a revolution, and owners from Werel went to Yeowe to suppress it, but lost. Once the owners were overthrown, men in Yeowe filled the power vacuum, treating “free” women little better than they were treated as assets. At first glance, this story (from the perspective of the American reader) feels like a condemnation of our nation’s worst behavior (and it is that, sure), but reading on, this is really a collection about the unfinished work of women’s liberation. The book’s final story focuses on a woman named Rakam who was born and lived as a slave on Werel. She is freed as an adult and educates herself, then begins educating others and publishing her opinions, which gets her in trouble with various political factions. She flees to Yeowe only to be enslaved a second time. She earns money, but it’s kept in an account on the plantation and she can’t withdraw any because she’s a woman. She can’t leave without fear of sexual violence. Rakam begins teaching girls to read (just the girls because everyone’s daily life is segregated by sex), only to be told girls don’t need or want to learn to read. Eventually, she begins organizing with other women on the plantation, and they are able to take their money and leave, but only through educating themselves and collaborating are they able to take their freedom back from the men and the owners. It’s a bit of a cliche that writers and readers are deeply invested in stories about the power of words and ideas, but it is because we ourselves have often been so transformed by what we found in books. Something about the way this tale was written, and the way Rakam uses her education to better the world for everyone around her really struck me. The tale does end happily: the women force the government to update their constitution to, among other things, stipulate that men and women both are free people with rights. We in the United States, however, are still waiting for that.

hardcover book Girl Online: A User Manual. Cover is silver with light green text
Girl Online: A User Manual

I thought I would like Girl Online: A User Manual by Joanna Walsh a lot more than I did. It’s in the “cyber feminism” genre and I really enjoyed my last read on the subject, Glitch Feminism. However, there was something about Girl Online that I just couldn’t connect with, which isn’t to say the book is bad, we just didn’t have chemistry. Walsh references Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass throughout this essay collection as I guess an extended metaphor for existing online but I didn’t really get it, perhaps because being online does much not feel like being through the looking glass to me. The only chapter that I was really able to lock into was one in which she used the “and I had to wonder” framework from Sex and the City. I’m not a SATC fan and haven’t really watched it but I am of course familiar with the many memes using this format. What did I learn from this book? Girl, I don’t know.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • The Bounty Economy Is Breaking Reality via User Mag. Last week, Pump dot fun, a platform where you can buy and trade meme coins, launched Pump Fun GO, a new service where you can “pay ANYONE to do ANYTHING,” which has “create[d] a new dystopian market where poor and desperate people debase themselves and others for small sums of money.” Long story short: if you see weird behavior, especially if someone is hollering about a cyptocurrency in the process, it’s probably a stunt that someone is being paid for. Still, between AI warping the internet and now this, I fear our reality is being further fractured.
  • Stop eating Lady Gaga’s Oreos via Experimental History. Remember the concept of “selling out”? And that it used to be a bad thing? Now everyone yearns to sell out and most of us are happy to participate in it by, as the title suggests, doing things like buying Lady Gaga Oreos (or shilling Walmart apparel on instagram). From the article, “If we want this to stop, the solution is simple: we have to stop eating Lady Gaga’s Oreos. We have to stop pretending that celebrities are just like us, and that their success is our success. We have to redraw the line between art and entertainment, and more importantly, we have to redraw the line between art and advertisement.”
  • The Guillotine Emoji Proposal via carrozo. This visionary artist submitted a proposal the the Unicode Consortium (the governing body of emojis) requesting the addition of a guillotine emoji, which “would serve as a reminder to states and elites to not take for granted the Hobbesian monopoly on violence they have been entrusted with by their peoples.” Alas, the Unicode Consortium denied this request, but the good news is you can download a pack of guillotine emojis for Signal. I have already put this to good use.
  • How to interpret medieval marginalia 101 via Weird Medieval Guys. I see lots of funny bits of medieval marginalia online (partly because I follow Medieval Marginalia on Tumblr) and it always seems goofy. However, these images had actual meaning beyond just “haha he’s got a trumpet sticking out of his butt.” An interesting little read, especially if you’re deep in the medieval-inflected internet.
  • Anthropeum is a very fun game and my new favorite thing online! They show you ten objects from the Met Museum’s collection and you guess where and when they are from. My degree in near eastern languages and civilizations is really coming in clutch for some of these artifacts.

Languages

I realized this week that I am in a bit of a rut with my Spanish studies. I like translating my Wikipedia articles and have no intention of stopping, but since it’s been a while since I’ve done something big like studying for the DELE exam, I’m feeling like I don’t have anything to mark my progress with. I want to keep improving my Spanish, of course, and use the language, but I’m not really sure what form that is going to take. Maybe this is part of a transition from thinking myself as a person learning Spanish to someone who simply knows Spanish. So, as a knower of Spanish (terms and conditions may apply), what now? I’ve been polling friends for ideas and mulling it over. I’ve gotten a number of suggestions to write something (but what?). A part of me thinks that I yearn for grad school, but I know better than to do that to myself. Friends don’t let friends go to grad school. Maybe I should give myself a syllabus. I’m also thinking the answer might be to take a deep dive and become an expert on some random topic of interest. Does anyone have any interesting suggestions? Please share them!

Doing Stuff

When my friends ask me if I want to try something new or do an activity I will almost always say yes, which is how I ended up at woodworking class with Abby a few weekends ago. We made cutting boards! Everyone received eight slats of wood and got to arrange them to their liking then stick them together with wood glue. We came back the next day to cut them, run the boards through the planer, and sand them. I never expected to learn any woodworking, if I’m being honest, but what better way to celebrate pride month (lol).

a cutting board made with eight slats of four colors of wood
my cutting board!
me in the woodshop modeling my new cutting board
me with my new cutting board

Moving It

Here are my last two weeks’ of stickers. I am having a hard time doing anything after Wednesday, possibly because my Fridays and Saturdays get full and then I am trying to rest on the other days. I can’t even blame the heat this time. Doing things is hard! But I must remember there are stickers for me. Also that long-legged “topaz” cat sticker looks like Fritz.

my planner with stickers of a sassy chicken and an orange cat snoozing on a pile of books
Stickers week of June 8
stickers of an orange cat with long legs, a puffball of a bird, and a celestial whale
stickers for the week of June 1

Kitchen Witchery

I put together the most indulgent spread possible as a send-off for a friend before she got weight loss surgery, which took the form of a butter-tasting party. We tried four different compound butters from Buttermonger: prosciutto, saffron and honey, cinnamon sugar, and cheese butter (that’s a one-to-one ratio of Beecher’s cheddar and butter). We had a bread pairing for each and then we had brownies (the “my favorite brownies” from 100 Cookies). My favorite was the saffron-honey butter with crescent rolls. We are just two women who can only eat so much butter so I still have a lot left and had to put some in the freezer for later. I want to let it be known that if any friends are looking at this and thinking “I would like a butter feast,” you do not have to get weight loss surgery to have this. We can just eat butter if you want. You don’t have to do anything drastic.

four small bowls of compound butters: cinnamon sugar, saffron and honey, cheddar cheese, and prosciutto
butter flight
a cutting board with crescent rolls, rosemary bread, zucchini bread, and club crackers next to bowls of compound butter
bread and butter pairings
a big pan of perfect brownies!
“my favorite brownies”

Outside of fancy butter, I made rainbow sprinkle cookies (the recipe is called “confetti cookies” but I feel like that would be something else. They are rainbow sprinkle to me), which were a hit. They’re very good and Kirk said they are “bad,” by which he means “so good that I just keep eating them.” Since the weather has been mild, I made a bread recipe that produces two loaves, so I can save a bread for when it’s too hot for the oven. I tried the oat and wheat sandwich bread from Smitten Kitchen, which I am enjoying for toast. I also made a grilled cheese where I fried the sandwich in the cheese butter and that was a pro move. In unpictured cooking: I tried another variation of homemade granola bars with cashews and white chocolate. They’re good!

As for actual meals, I have been enjoying my squash and corn from the farmers market. I made an herbed summer squash pasta bake, which we enjoyed. I didn’t have fresh herbs as the recipe calls for, but I tossed in some dried parsley and dill and that seemed tasty. We also really liked this recipe for cheesy gnocchi with corn and pesto. Hard to go wrong with a combination of ingredients like that!

a sheet pan of small sugar cookies completely coated in rainbow sprinkles
confetti cookies
two loaves of oat and wheat sandwich bread cooling on a wire rack
oat and wheat sandwich bread
baked pasta that is basically a light macaroni and cheese full of herbs and zucchini
herbed summer squash pasta bake
a plate of gnocchi with corn and pesto, topped in melted cheese. Two cornmeal-coated chicken tenders
cheesy gnocchi with corn and pesto

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat sitting on the bed and looking intently at me
standing at attention
Fritz on the top of the couch half asleep and just looking blobby and blissed out
this fucking guy
Fritz's little pink beans sticking out from under a blanket
only peets
An extreme close up of Fritz the cat's face
extreme close up
weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: June 7, 2026

Posted on by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. I’ve been noticing a lot of medieval stuff online lately and it got me wondering: what’s going on with that?

a collage of medieval-themed internet ephemera
art thou feeling medieval?

I understand that social media is algorithmic and looking at weird medieval stuff means I will get more weird medieval stuff to look at, but the fact is that many other people are making this stuff. There is something inspiring this and I’m not the first person to reflect on the subject. There’s a post from Zombie Grrrl Zine that explains that the Victorians were also obsessed with the middle ages, noting that “While class consciousness was reaching new heights in the industrial hellscape of Victorian England, an escapist fantasy was taking hold: the medieval period became a time of whimsy and freedom in the eyes of the Victorian lower class.” I think we’re seeing something similar now. People are sick to death of capitalism, of exploitation, of corporations telling them that they can train an LLM to do their job or leave (get fired now or later!). In some ways, it does sound more attractive to work the fields as a serf and potentially have more days off than you do now at the email factory. At least the serfs were doing something useful. Many of us are just out here like “I already answered this question in the previous email. Please see attached :-)” and trying to cling to any semblance of sanity. Why not inject a little whimsy into your day with some bardcore music or maybe by being a silly little jester (the amount of clowning and jestering I’m seeing online is off the charts too).

There’s a kind of class solidarity through time right now. It’s as if people are saying we have more in common with a peasant than a CEO. Income inequality is basically as high as it’s ever been. We’re using terms like “late-stage capitalism” to herald the downfall of the current order, but what comes next? As Ursula K. Le Guin so sagely noted in a 2014 speech, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.” The Medieval period was the last time in Western history that we lived without capitalism. Faced with the difficulty of picturing the future without a profit motive, many are embracing the past in an attempt to buck the current system. It’s easier to imagine the past than an unknown future. Medievalism may not be showing us the way forward but it is, perhaps, revealing some truths about where we want to go next.

Books and Other Words

paperback book of Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess. The cover features Bobby Fischer apparently thinking deeply about his next chess move
Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess

As I’ve mentioned previously, I’ve been playing chess this year (be my friend on chess.com!), so I decided to read a book about it. Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess by Bobby Fischer, Stuart Margulies, and Don Mosenfelder is certainly not written by Fischer himself despite having his name on the cover, but I don’t think that’s particularly important. Magulies and Mosenfelder use the introduction to explain that this book employs a novel concept of prompting you to complete the puzzles instead of, presumably, just lecturing you about chess. I guess this is a wild idea for 1966, when the book was originally published. After some initial explanations, each page of the book has a puzzle with the answer available when you flip to the next page. This results in the unique formatting choice to have half of the pages flipped upside down, so you go through the book reading all the right-side pages, flip it, and continue through the rest. It’s ingenious but wacky. I do think I learned a lot from working through the puzzles, which focus on a few tactics like back rank checks and drawing out a defender. We shall see if my game improves.

From Bobby Fischer teaches chess. The right page is right-side-up and has an answer for the puzzle on the previous page, then the next puzzle. The left page is upside-down and is the beginning of chapter five.
rare book format choice
paperback book: Worlds of Exile and Illusion
Worlds of Exile and Illusion

I’ve been on an Ursula K. Le Guin bender over the last few weeks. I started with the collection Worlds of Exile and Illusion, which consists of the first three novels of the Hainish Cycle: Rocannon’s World, Planet of Exile, and City of Illusions (the novels are about 100 pages apiece so they fit in one volume). Each of these works takes place on a different planet that has highly intelligent life forms (HILFs). The Hainish Cycle, so named for the Hain who are the progenitors of most HILFs, is only a loosely connected series (what we might now refer to as the Hainish Extended Universe) with books taking place in the same reality but with no real connection or through-line between them. These first three books all seem to be asking “what is it to be human?” This is a common question in science fiction but I liked the perspective that Le Guin approached it with. Can humans really come from the stars? Would a human look like that, or what if he were the enemy but looked just like a real human (a question of City of Illusions)? I also find it interesting that she plays with how different planets’ movement through space would impact a world’s culture. For example, in Planet of Exile, a “year” lasts about 60 Earth years, which means any society that survives has to have the strength and fortitude to make it through a twenty-year winter. These are all well-written and great works of science fiction, but Le Guin really gets cooking with the next book: The Left Hand of Darkness.

cover for The Left Hand of Darkness shown on kobo ereader
The Left Hand of Darkness

I first read The Left Hand of Darkness ten years ago. I wrote last year that I felt like I’d gotten better at reading, and I sensed that again while revisiting this book. I kind of thought of reading as a skill as something that peaked in college and then just stayed steady, but I suppose practicing any skill will make you better at it, and I have read over 600 books since I last read this one. Still, it feels surprising to re-read something and have such a fundamentally different experience. In any case, in The Left Hand of Darkness, Genly Ai, a representative from a galactic confederation of planets, visits the planet Winter (locally known as Gethen) to invite them to join. Gethen is an icy planet populated by a people who have no fixed sex or gender. Instead of being in a permanent state of man or woman, they go through a phase called kemmer every 26 days and take on sexual characteristics of a man or woman; one person may play either role at different times in their life. This book, originally published in 1969, is thus a meditation on gender relations. What if anyone could get pregnant? Le Guin rightfully posits a much more equal society without one gender being an oppressed class. The result is that “nobody here is quite so free as a free male anywhere else” because “burden and privilege are shared out pretty equally.” What an indictment of the men of Earth.

We see The Left Hand of Darkness play out primarily through Genly’s viewpoint, as a man from a world of men and women. He refers to everyone as a man unless he feels that they have some sort of feminine trait about them, like his “landlady” who he considers womanly due to having a fat ass. He opines, “One is respected and judged only as a human being. It is an appalling experience.” The horror! Genly lets his misogyny blind him to the dangers of his situation and, after fleeing one country and being taken in by a certain political faction in another, he gets used as a political pawn and is eventually sent to prison. He is rescued by Therem Harth rem ir Estraven, a politician who Genly though had betrayed him. Genly is forced to reckon with his prejudices on the harrowing trek back to civilization, noting at one point “I had no wanted to give my trust, my friendship to a man who was a woman, a woman who was a man.” If only Genly hadn’t been such a dumbass and had been willing to see anyone other than men as complex human beings, he might not have been in this mess!

paperback book The Dispossessed
The Dispossessed

Technically, the next book in the series is technically The Word for World is Forest, but I accidentally read out of order. That’s okay though because you could really read these in any order. The book I read instead was The Dispossessed, which was my favorite so far. I know this book will stay with me. The story concerns Shevek, a physicist from Anarres, a habitable moon of the planet Urras. Anarres is home to a society of anarcho-communists founded about 150 years before the story begins by a woman named Odo (this made me laugh because I kept thinking of Odo from Deep Space Nine). The strongest insult on Anarres is “profiteer” and anyone behaving badly is implored to “stop egoizing.” The story alternates between past events on Anarres and present events on Urras, where Shevek is the first person from Anarres to visit since the original dissidents left. It’s not until the end of the book that we learn precisely what drove Shevek to leaving his home and family to dwell among these rotten profiteers. In the process, we see what is ugly about both societies. Despite that, this is not a book that suggests that human nature is greedy or evil; quite the contrary. The Dispossessed shows people striving to make society better for everyone. Certainly not everyone is doing their part and there are people at the top of the hierarchy making the people below them miserable (whether the oligarchs on Urras keeping the population poor and at war or the unofficial head of the physics department on Anarres who refuses to distribute Shevek’s work without rewriting it and making it into his work). Le Guin’s power is in helping us imagine other ways of being and The Dispossessed might be her most powerful work of all.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

  • GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan draws an unusual opponent in Alaska’s primary — and he’s not happy about it via AP. One of the candidates challenging Alaska’s incumbent senator, Republican Dan Sullivan, is also a Republican named Dan Sullivan. Truly hilarious. No notes.
  • The Surprisingly Radical Roots of the Renaissance Fair via Smithsonian Magazine. The people who gave us the renaissance fair were actors out of work thanks to McCartyhism and the Red Scare. I had no idea!
  • Attention Spans Aren’t Shrinking via Cognitive Wonderland. It’s a widely held cultural belief at this point that smart phones and social media are making our attention spans shorter, but that’s not what research is finding. There is research to show that, in the short term, we struggle to recover attention when switching tasks (for example, when trying to write an essay then looking at instagram), but that is not the same as having a short attention span. The author here also theorizes that it’s much more obvious that someone isn’t paying attention when they look at their phone compared to just letting their mind wander.
  • ‘Stop! That! Train!’ Director Denies Film’s Speculated AI Use: RuPaul-Led “Movie Is Fully Human Made” via The Hollywood Reporter. There’s a whole drama (dare I say, discourse) arising around RuPaul’s latest theatrical release. People online pointed out some visual inconsistencies in the trailer that are the kind of thing one finds in AI graphics and that AI-forward visual effects companies worked on the film. The director posted a statement reading “It’s come to my attention that there is some on-line speculation that Stop! That! Train! Is full of fully generative AI shots and I’m here to tell you this is patently not true.” What a strange and specific thing to say. Why not just say there’s no AI if they didn’t use AI? It’s disappointing all around.
  • I Fed the People Building the Metaverse via Titty Boobowitz (inspired blog name haha). This essay is by a woman who worked as a pastry chef at the Meta offices. She writes:

This is what I mean when I say I do not trust the people building AI.

Not because they are uniquely evil geniuses plotting world domination in secret underground bunkers. The real problem is that they are ordinary institutions filled with ordinary failures of character. Ego. Bias. Cowardice. Protectionism. Mediocre men promoting versions of themselves while women quietly keep entire systems functioning underneath them.

And then we act shocked when artificial intelligence reproduces racism, sexism, surveillance, exploitation, and bias at scale.

Who did we think was building it?

Media

It recently came to my attention that Heaven 17 has more than one album. I write this knowing that maybe only three readers (two of which would be my parents) have even heard of Heaven 17. I’ve been listening to Penthouse and Pavement for literal decades after ripping the CD in my dad’s collection. I think we can all agree that Fascist Groove Thing both goes hard and remains relevant in 2026. In any case, I bought two of their other two albums, The Luxury Gap and How Men are and have been appreciating them. I’m not sure why I never looked for more of their albums before but I’m here now.

Rampant Consumerism

I recently bought some hat stands to put on the wall in my office so I could display my fancy hats. I just think they deserve more than being stuffed in the closet. So, behold my hats:

two hat stands in my office, one displaying a green witch hat and another with the double henin from my jester outfit
hats on display

Moving It

I was on a really good run of exercising a lot for the first few months of this year but, as I might have expected, the warmer weather is making my life difficult. I think I am going to have to lower my expectations for the hot weather because it’s not working for me. In any case, enjoy the last two weeks’ stickers.

stickers in my planner featuring a duck with a knife, a cartoon cat sobbing, a fancy cake, and a silvery planet
stickers for the week of May 18
stickers in my planner featuring two different swords, a cartoon bunny with a sword, and a goose wielding a baseball bat
Stickers for the week of May 25: SWORDS

Kitchen Witchery

Sometimes I look at my photos from the last fortnight and realize I’ve been cooking more than I thought. I was trying really hard to use everything I bought at the farmers market two weeks ago! It’s probably a good thing that I’m looking for ways to use all the vegetables. We went to the farmers market again yesterday, so I will hopefully find more success here.

  • I pulled some red beans (a The Bean Book recipe) from the freezer, roasted broccolini and cooked some rice for a recent dinner. I made cornbread to go with it using purple(!) cornmeal. This isn’t like that purple ketchup abomination from the 90s. The cornmeal is purple because it’s made from blue corn.
  • This broccoli cheddar beans recipe is good, although I did modify it a little (as one must when it comes to NYT recipes). I added shell pasta to make it more of a meal and some seasoning. I also declined to participate in the fuckery of making cheddar croutons. You can just eat regular bread. It’s fine.
  • I have some buckwheat flour that I have been trying to find more uses for so I tried out this pancake recipe and it was good. I roasted some potatoes to accompany it (also good).
  • To use some sausage that we had knocking around the fridge and some more broccolini, I adapted the NYT recipe for crisp gnocchi with sausage and peas, swapping the peas for the aforementioned broccolini. We liked this a lot and frankly I think it’s better than the original version.
  • In an attempt to use some of the large amount of fresh garlic I had, I made this slow-cooker garlic chicken with barley. I did not like it. Kirk declared it “edible” and did, in fact, eat a bowlful. I need to remember to never listen to a recipe that calls for throwing slices of onion into the slow cooker because I never like the results, although that was far from my only objection to this dish.
  • By request, I made this garlic and herb sun bread (much better use for my quantity of fresh garlic), which we had with pasta e fagioli soup (another one from The Bean Book). I threw in some extra zucchini and that was a welcome addition.
  • I finally mastered the dark chocolate and sea salt nut bars. The first two times I made them, I just ended up with a blob. It was a tasty blob but I was going for bar. I doubled the quantity of rice krispies because it seemed like I kept ending up with too much honey compared to the stuff it needed to stick to. I also poured the chocolate on top of the bars, cut them once the chocolate had set somewhat, then left them in the fridge overnight. I don’t really know what the people who wrote this recipe are doing to make it all stick like that, but this method worked for me.
a plate of red beans and rice with broccolini and purple cornbread
red beans and rice with broccolini and purple cornbread
a pan of freshly baked cornbread. It's purple (ish)!
purple cornbread
a pot of what is essentially macaroni and cheese with broccoli and beans
broccoli cheddar beans and pasta
A plate of buckwheat pancakes topped with maple syrup, and roasted potato wedges
Buckwheat pancakes and roasted potato wedges
a bowl of gnocchi with sausage and broccolini topped with a little pile of parmesan
gnocchi with sausage and broccolini
a bowl of an anemic-looking stewy pile of barley, onion, and peas with herbed chunks of chicken on top
garlic chicken with barley
a bowl of bean and noodle soup with chunks of carrots and zucchini, topped with parmesan
pasta e fagioli soup with zucchini
a bread with a round center and twisted pieces radiated outwards. Cheesy filling is visible in the twists and it's all dusted with herbs and parmesan
sun bread
a batch of granola bars consisting of nuts and a layer of chocolate. the bars are holding their shape, unlike last time.
granola bar mastery

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat, lying on top of me, stretched out into a long skinny noodle of a creature. His front legs are stretched across my chest and he's got his chin tucked into his chest
this guy is such a shape
Fritz the cat lounging on top of the couch. He is looking towards the camera. His tail is wound around in front of him so we can see that its tip is white
tail highlight
Fritz the cat on the windowsill at night. He's perked up and looking intently out into the night
Night watch
Fritz the cat on the corner of the bed, all his legs tucked under him but his body is stretched out so he has a certain worm-like quality
sandworm mode
Fritz the cat stretched out under a dining chair to catch the sun, which is punctuated by the shadows of the shutter
afternoon sun