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.
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
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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!
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
