Digital Manticore

Two Weeks in the Life: March 8, 2026

Posted on March 8, 2026 by Lindsey Halsell / 0 Comment

Hello, friends and enemies. I have to resist the urge to begin most posts with something like “wow, shit is NUTS, right?” because shit is nuts and is only getting nuttier and, indeed, the nuttiness never seems to stop. Instead I will say that I think we are all feeling similarly mad right now. It sucks, but it’s not just you (or me, for that matter)!

Current Events

I’ve been completely riled up about the technology known as “artificial intelligence” (in most cases, a glorified auto-complete machine called a large language model [LLM]). Lately, the very mention of AI sends me into a rage, which has been a problem since my corporate overlords have been heavily promoting their AI “tools” (why the hell would I need AI to summarize an email for me when it takes one minute to read? What even are jobs now?) After some reflection, I realized that one of the reasons it makes me so mad is that I have devoted a lot of my time and free will in this life to the pursuit of knowledge. I have a whole-ass masters degree in library and information science. You know, the degree where you take entire classes on how to find information. I have studied searching at a graduate level and now people are telling me to just ask the chronically mendacious plagiarism machine? Open AI has trained its model to “reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty” like some kind of mid-level executive raised from the depths of consultant hell, yet we’re supposed to entrust it with thinking through complex ideas for us? Why would I, an expert in finding information and evaluating its credibility, ask a knowingly bad computer program to do it for me? Why is everyone so invested in this?

Tumblr post from user FreakOutGirl starting: The internet seems like a distant dream. Whatever we are on R N is not the internet. It's ads — It’s just ads

It seems like the whole concept of the internet has been ruined. It’s not exclusively the fault of AI, but that may have been the last straw. The web has been hollowed out by advertisements and social media over the last decade. People my age remember the internet being fun and full of websites. Now there are “five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.” As of October 2025, AI-generated content made up about “half of all new articles on the internet” based on a “random sample of 65,000 English-language articles.” We’re also seeing increasing amounts of AI text on Wikipedia, one of the few reliable places left on the internet thanks to concentrated human effort (yes, that includes my efforts and I am biased). However, Wikipedia has also made deals with major tech companies to “pay for high-volume API access to Wikipedia content, which these companies use to train AI models like Microsoft Copilot and ChatGPT.” What happens when the AI model keeps eating its own slop? Will the internet be worth anything to us anymore? Will being able to ask the plagiarism machine to write your emails have been worth it?

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

There’s a short story by Isaac Asimov I keep thinking about. It’s called “The Feeling of Power” and it opens with: “Jehan Shuman was used to dealing with the men in authority on a long-embattled Earth. He was only a civilian but he originated programming patterns that resulted in self-directing war computers of the highest sort.” As on-the-nose as that sounds for a critique of today’s news (this story was written in 1958), that’s not what I remember it for. The story centers on the lowly technician Ladislas Aub who has learned how to do arithmetic by hand. No one else knows how to do math, relying instead on computers to do it for them. In fact, everyone is incredulous that a person can just do math, which is something only computers can do. I thought this was very silly when I first read it as a teenager. Using a calculator won’t make us forget how to do basic math! Yet, as hyperbolic as that is, it feels like people are literally forgetting how to do things like look up information or write an email without help from the plagiarism machine. Who benefits from us willingly abdicating our ability to think through simple tasks?

tweet by @jazzanchovy dated November 25, 2025 that reads: Today a coworker said he "challenged himself" to "old school google" something instead of using chat GPT. And that he "used to be really good at googling" and it was "hard" for him cause he "only uses chat GPT now." He said this out loud in a meeting — the feeling of powerlessness

Aside from the choices people are making to stop using their brains, I’m mad at how, much like in Asimov’s story, AI is being used to wage war. On March 3, The Guardian reported that “Anthropic’s AI model, Claude, was reportedly used by the US military in the barrage of strikes as the technology ‘shortens the kill chain’ – meaning the process of target identification through to legal approval and strike launch.” This technology resulted in the U.S. and Israel launching “almost 900 strikes on Iranian targets in the first 12 hours alone.” Nine-hundred bombs in twelve hours! We are using a technology that kills people faster because the people deploying the bombs aren’t individually selecting targets. The United States thinks so little of people in the rest of the world that it won’t even spend human effort on deciding who to kill; a machine does that now.

This already high level of disregard for human life has not gone far enough for this administration’s taste. Ars Technica reports that the Department of Defense was renegotiating its contract with Anthropic to “to eliminate restrictions on how AI can be deployed and instead permit ‘all lawful use’ of the technology.” This refers to “one, mass surveillance of American citizens, and two, lethal autonomous weapons with no human oversight.” This is obviously terrible for many reasons, but the response to this news has resulted in a bizarre liberal mania in which Antrhopic’s Claude is now the “woke” AI model to use, becoming the most downloaded free application in the Apple app store. Claude “dethron[ed] OpenAI’s ChatGPT just one day after the Pentagon tapped OpenAI to supply AI to classified military networks.” I can’t believe I even have to say this but: there is no such thing as a “woke” AI. Every AI model is built on so much stolen data that asking for artist consent would “‘basically kill’ the AI industry.” Before this dustup, the Pentagon used the Claude AI in capturing Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro. There is nothing woke, progressive, leftist, liberal, social justice warrior, or girlboss feminism about kidnapping of the leader of a sovereign nation without provocation.

Parody of "you wouldn't download a car" PSA that says "You wouldn't train AI on someone else's intellectual property without asking first". Generated with https://youwouldntsteala.website/editor.html — Yes, I’m using this again. Generated with https://youwouldntsteala.website/editor.html

AI is a surveillance machine. That is how it “knows” how to pick targets for the military. It is, of course, being deployed against us here in the United States too. The Department of Homeland Security is using applications developed by Palantir to “process data.” While DHS and Palantir have been working together for over a decade, “[i]n April, the Homeland Security Department awarded Palantir a nearly $30 million contract to build a system backed by artificial intelligence that would help find and track individuals for deportation.” ICE is also is using Clearview AI’s facial recognition software (which, for the record, received early funding from Peter Thiel, the man behind Palantir), which ICE agents have been using in Minnesota to identify protestors without their consent.

Facial recognition is also about to be weaponized to ruin the internet for us once and for all (as if turning everything into advertisements wasn’t enough). Countries around the world have started implementing age verification laws online, beginning with Australia prohibiting anyone under 16 from accessing social media. The problem is that verifying whether a 15-year-old is attempting to use social media requires that every user submits to age verification. This often means submitting a photo of one’s face or a picture of an ID. This is bad for everyone: “This system not only allows big tech companies to harvest even more deeply personal data on children, but it creates massive cybersecurity risks. Data harvested by identity verification systems does not stay private.” While the United States is considering bills on this subject, America’s favorite governor who stands for nothing at all, Gavin Newsom, recently decided to get a jump on this particular strain of surveillance and signed a bill that will require operating system providers (i.e., Windows, MacOS, Linux) “to collect age information from users at account setup and transmit that data to app developers via a real-time API, with the law taking effect on January 1, 2027.” This would mean that anyone using a computer has to provide their ID, which will go to some database, before they can even use that computer. In the UK, the Wikimedia Foundation sued to challenge the way the government determined which sites had to follow the strictest rules, a category that included Wikipedia. Unfortunately, Wikimedia lost, which means that internet users in the UK have to submit to age verification even to use Wikipedia.

Age verification will kill the internet. This is so dire that over 400 computer scientists have signed an open letter urging governments not to pursue these laws, writing “this influence could be used to censor information and prevent users from accessing services.” I must assume that a big part of this backlash to the free and open internet is because people are getting too aware of the fact that everyone else in the world is people, just like them. That is to say, the propaganda isn’t working like it used to. We have to cut Americans off from the internet before their views of the Israeli government become even less favorable.

There is still hope. Every time you think for yourself or skip the option to use your face to verify something, you are helping avoid the worst version of the future. One reason Anthropic may have turned down the Pentagon on the updated contract is that they simply don’t have the technical capability to do it (neither does OpenAI but they don’t care). Every search, every query, every use of AI trains the machine. The number one thing you can do is simply reject it. As Ann Helen Petersen exhorts us in Culture Study, don’t let the machines do the living. I know existence is highly discouraging right now, but the solution to exhaustion and outrage isn’t to outsource to the computer.

One of the most anti-fascist actions you can do right now is to use your own brain! You are always allowed to just not fucking do it! You do not have to use any form of AI, even if some people are being very loud about it. Many people with a lot of money have a vested interest in all of us just forgetting how to do things we have been doing just fine for years. Do not underestimate the power of “no” in these times. Thinking for yourself is always the biggest threat to authoritarianism. Don’t give that power away for free.

meme image of a skeleton running away overlaid with the text: Just walk out. You can leave!!! If it sucks... Hit da bricks!! real winners quit — just walk out!

Books and Other Words

book cover of Miranda in Milan featuring a charmingly illustrated medieval cityscape — Miranda in Milan

Miranda in Milan by Katharine Duckett is basically a work of fan fiction—and I mean that affectionately—of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. The story begins where The Tempest ends, with Miranda and her father Prospero returning to Milan. Miranda doesn’t understand court behavior or why she’s made to wear a veil at all times. The story follows Miranda as she tries to figure out what the hell is going on and she falls for one of her maids. There is magic and intrigue, all the good stuff. I enjoyed it even though I’m not especially familiar with the source material. I would wager it’s even more fun if you really know all the characters.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

The No World Order via Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter. The best piece you will read about why we are waging war on Iran.
AI Added ‘Basically Zero’ to US Economic Growth Last Year, Goldman Sachs Says via Gizmodo. Lol. LMAO even.
People Are Calling Meta Ray-Bans “Pervert Glasses” via Futurism. As well they should. Anyone who uses these glasses is a huge loser who deserves to be ostracized.
Women’s sizing via The Pudding. The data shows that women’s clothing sizes are made for people who don’t exist. I’ve been thinking a lot about our cultural obsession with staying thin and what external forces encourage the belief that we should all be able to fit into clothes we wore in high school.
How To Weave Friendship Into Everyday Life via Culture Study. Some great observations (and examples) on incorporating casual friend outings into one’s life. Consistent and casual seems to be the key.

Computer World

One aspect of Linux that has been bedeviling me is how to insert en and em dashes. The key combos to enter them in windows—alt + 0150 or alt + 0151, respectively—are part of my muscle memory at this point. I finally got sick of my workarounds and looked up how to properly do this on Linux. You have to designate a “compose” key in keyboard settings (it sounds complicated but it’s very simple); mine is the right control key (and I will note that once the key is set as the compose key, it doesn’t do its old job anymore). Once that’s enabled, you tap the compose key then the hyphen three times for the em dash (two hyphens then period for the en). Et voila: — –

While we’re on the subject, I found out that the Linux Foundation offers free courses in the operating system works. It’s now on my (infinite) to-do list because I really do want to understand Linux! The course looks comprehensive and I am hoping I can find time to start digging into it. Here’s the link: https://trainingportal.linuxfoundation.org/courses/introduction-to-linux-lfs101

Corporeal Form

I mentioned last time that I was getting the gel injections for my knee and you may be wondering if they worked. I think it’s helping! I got my third and final injection last week, and this week, between the shots and my pulled calf muscle finally loosening up, I felt fairly good for the first time in at least a month. I’m really hoping these injections last a while (you’re supposed to feel relief for about six months). The cortisone only got me about three weeks of feeling decent, but it’s definitely not good for you to get a steroid shot every three weeks. Fortunately, the gel injections are much safer.

Moving It

After getting my knee tuned up, I saw my physical therapist to get my exercises updated. Apparently it is a challenge to find things I can do to strengthen my legs while not aggravating my knee. Typically, when people have serious arthritis they don’t have a lot of muscle so their PT can be like, stand up and sit down ten times but that won’t do shit for me. Now I have to stand one-footed on a platform and hold onto something (in my case, the squat rack), and lower into a squat until my toe touches the floor. To facilitate this, I bought one of these little step-up platforms. I quite like it and I’ve been using it for my bar hang practice too. It’s a little more comfortable than stepping from the bench to the band to practice my hangs.

squat rack with a thick elastic band positioned for bar hang support, a 12-inch platform in front of it to step up onto the band — current bar hang setup

Kitchen Witchery

Last weekend, we had one of our themed potlucks. This one was potatoes! It was truly a celebration of all things potato. I made a loaded potato bread with bacon, cheese, and chives in it (from The Harvest Baker) and a fennel, potato, and white bean soup (from The Bean Book). We also had gnocchi, an assortment of gratins, and even cupcakes. In regularly scheduled meals, I tried a recipe for tofu and sweet potato peanut butter curry. I appreciated that it was very easy and reasonably tasty.

a plate of at least five types of potato dish alongside a bowl of soup — potato extravanganza

a squat loaf of bread not unlike a soda bread cut in half to show that it is studded with cheese, bacon, and chives — potato extravanganza

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat lounging inside a sweatshirt with his front leg sticking out — temperature control

Fritz the cat cuddling with me in bed, but looking intently at something outside — temperature control

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: February 22, 2026

Posted on February 22, 2026 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. I’ve had a bit of a rough time the last couple weeks thanks to the arthritis and it’s been hard to do much. Two weeks ago, my knee started hurting a lot more than it had been and it even hurt to walk. I haven’t been doing anything high impact or especially strenuous, so I’m not sure what brought it on other than the ongoing degeneration of my crappy knee joint. The good news is I was already scheduled to get my first round of gel injections, also known as hyaluronic acid, the same stuff those Olympic ski jumpers have been injecting into their nether regions to try to get a little extra fabric in their suits, operating on the same physical principle as a flying squirrel. I’m getting three injections of what I’m now exclusively calling “dick acid” over the course of three weeks. The stuff takes a little time to work, but I am very much hoping it will do something for me because this pain is making it difficult for me to go about my business. I don’t want to get too optimistic but I think I’m starting to feel a little better. Thank you, dick acid.

Current Events

I think we need to start taking seriously the possibility that elections are not going to count for much in the future. Let’s start with the SAVE Act, which I was yelling about this time last year. This bill, which has already passed the House, would require “individuals to provide documentary proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in federal elections.” This means you would need to show a birth certificate, passport, or similar to register to vote. Most people do not have these documents handy, or if they do have their birth certificate, it might not match their current name, especially for married women or transgender people. For something practical you can do right now, I suggest getting or renewing your passport (or consider getting a divorce and changing your name back!). You can now apply for passports online and it’s very easy; I just renewed mine last week. They seem to be moving quickly at the passport office right now, so I do recommend that women, in particular, take advantage of that.

Still, even if everyone has a passport and the documents to prove citizenship, this is a pointless and cruel piece of legislation. Voter fraud, which this legislation ostensibly aims to eliminate, 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.

Keeping people from voting seems to be one of the key developing projects of this administration. Last month, amid the chaos ICE has been visiting on Minneapolis, Attorney General Pam Bondi demanded that Minnesota turn over their voter rolls to the federal government. As The Guardian reports, “What do voter rolls have to do with ICE? Nothing. But they have a lot to do with the administration’s ongoing efforts to meddle in elections,” Wendy Weiser, vice-president for democracy at the Brennan Center for Justice, a thinktank, posted on X. “The administration may not threaten ICE deployment to pressure states to cooperate with its improper efforts to interfere in elections.” We also recently saw the FBI raiding the Fulton County election offices in Georgia. Despite being an obvious tantrum about Trump losing to Biden in 2020, this could have real consequences.

The Trump administration is obsessed with elections because of Trump’s vanity, among other things. Trump lost elections when his main opponent was a man and only won against women. Accusations of Russian interference in elections have followed him for ten years. He is so unpopular that Gallup is going to stop tracking presidential approval ratings. Per the article, “Trump’s second-term approval rating fell to 36% in December, which is among the lowest ever recorded by the company. The US president started his second term with an approval rating of 47%.” Trump only wants to play when he knows he can win. He wants to be putting up dictator numbers so he can say he won 90 percent or more of the vote. I’m desperately hoping he dies before his term ends so we don’t have to find out how serious he is about trying to run for a third term in 2028 (yes, I know this is illegal but I don’t think Trump cares. He’s already a convicted felon and yet he is the president).

ICE now has a budget that is almost equal to that of Canada’s military, and it would be the 17th largest military in the world based on funding. Why are we funding a military-sized force for something that is only directed at our own citizens? In Arizona, the state senate is currently reviewing a proposal to have ICE stationed at polling places. Very few people are going to turn up to vote when they could be kidnapped by ICE agents. California has introduced a bill to do exactly the opposite, banning ICE from polling sites, which is great for us but there are 49 other states to worry about. Still, Trump was out in public saying that we should “nationalize the voting.” I don’t think it’s unreasonable that his underlings may carry out this idea using ICE agents as enforcement.

I wish I had something optimistic to add or something we could all go out and do about this, but there are no longer any easy suggestions and I’m just here chronicling the madness because I feel compelled to do so. The way people are fighting back in Minnesota is probably what we will all need to start doing. Perhaps we also need to take a cue from this local hero.

Books and Other Words

cover for Bullshit Jobs shown on Kobo ereader — Bullshit Jobs

I can’t believe it took me so long to read David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs: A Theory! This is exactly the book I needed in my life. I already have a lot of opinions on the nature and utility of many forms of work, but Bullshit Jobs added a lot of clarity and nuance for me.

Graeber begins with defining a bullshit job as:

“A form of paid employment that is so completely pointless, unnecessary, or pernicious that even the employee cannot justify its existence even though, as part of the conditions of employment, the employee feels obliged to pretend that this is not the case.”

He goes on to categorize bullshit jobs into five types: flunkies, box tickers, duct tapers, goons, and taskmasters, explaining their origins and how their different roles suggest that most of the “bullshitization” of jobs comes from political motivations, not economic ones. There are plenty of non-bullshit jobs out there, but because our we are “a civilization based on work—not even “productive work” but work as an end and meaning in itself,” we have created a whole class of jobs that don’t really serve any purpose except keeping people employed. This isn’t unlike the USSR’s “millions of dummy proletarian jobs” but we have “dummy white-collar jobs instead.” Graeber cites a survey that found that “37 to 40 percent of workers in rich countries already feel their jobs are pointless.” That’s huge! More than one-third of workers admit to thinking that their job accomplishes nothing. This is a huge drain on all of us; working 40 hours “regardless of what there is to do … def[ies] all common sense.” It’s delivering huge psychic damage to us all.

Graeber also addresses the idea that people who have bullshit jobs should just be glad of their circumstances. They don’t have to do anything but they get paid! Unfortunately, most people find that pretending to work all day is a huge drain on one’s creative energies. After a long day of putting energy into something pointless, most people don’t have energy left for much beyond watching TV and spending money on random shit, which Graeber terms “compensatory capitalism.” Yet, some people are able to find a kind of “guerrilla purpose” to combat the “spiritual warfare” of bullshit jobs and find ways to do useful things during work, although that seems to be a minority.

Ending the scourge of bullshit jobs is not going to be easy, in large part because Graeber writes that this is a political problem rather than an economic one. Creating lots of bullshit jobs is effectively a new form of feudalism in which corporations distribute resources and managers get to feel important by employing many underlings. There is also the issue of how people would be able to afford to live without bullshit jobs propping up so many people. Instead of corporate patronage, one solution would be something like Universal Basic Income, where every single person gets enough money to live regardless of their circumstances. Graber suggests that part of the reason we don’t have universal healthcare in the United States is that these dummy jobs are acting like a form of welfare. He mentions an interview in which President Obama explained that he couldn’t push for something like Medicare for All because too many health insurance employees would be out of a job. Bleak!

Tweet from @PopulismUpdates of a photo of man wearing a bowtie with the caption "Ulysses S. Grant's great-grandson, an author of gay vampire fiction." This is retweeted by @netcapgirl with the comment "i must study war so my sons can study business so their sons can study art so their sons can write gay vampire fiction" — oh, I think people would still find work to do

Another issue is that many people in bullshit jobs seem to envy people in jobs that benefit society—nurses, teachers, sewage plant inspectors—so we end up with a perverse logic like “of course teachers shouldn’t be paid much, they’re already doing a job that is important! The rest of us need to be paid a lot for the psychic torture of doing a bullshit job!” How do we get people to realize that instead of everyone suffering together, we could do something else? Literally anything else? We all want our lives to have meaning, but these fake white-collar jobs are not the way to to it. People love to argue that we’d get “bored” or do nothing at all without work, but we almost always see rich people who don’t have to work making art in one form or another. People want to take care of each other and make art! That’s the whole human experience!

This book also reminded me of some of the things I took away from Can’t Pay Won’t Pay by the Debt Collective, which, of course, did cite Graeber’s work (notably Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which I have yet to read). The Debt Collective and Graeber both discuss care work as something that could be considered the basis of the economy rather than making and selling things. Graeber talks about this as a form of “maintenance” work, in contrast to our typical image of a working class person, who works in a factory and maybe makes cars. But, as Graeber points out, you make a cup once and wash it 1,000 times, so why isn’t our economy centered around taking care of people and things? This in turn made me think of How Infrastructure Works: Inside the Systems That Shape Our World which describes caring for infrastructure as a form of maintenance that is disincentivized in favor of making new things, even though we have lots of energy available on this earth to maintain things and relatively few resources with which to produce new objects. Pivoting our economy away from having upwards half of the population doing jobs where they feel they contribute nothing to society would have huge benefits for the climate and the culture. The first step is convincing people that life could be different.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Governor Newsom proclaims Ronald Reagan Day via the California Governor’s website. I swear to god, if you chucklefucks elect this man as our next president, I will scream. My current theory is that he’s going to announce he’s running as a Republican to save the soul of the GOP from Trump and fend of the worst excesses of the Democrats.
Meet the Gorgeous Winner of Japan’s Capybara Bath Contest via Tokyo Weekender. The zoos in Japan have a contest to see which capybara can spend the most time in a bath. I can only say that I hope I get reincarnated as a capybara in a Japanese zoo.

Computer World

I am proud to say that I’ve had two friends this week ask me about installing Linux. I’m certainly not an expert but the fact that I’ve done it at all makes me a minor authority, so that is cool. I learned that the Linux Foundation website has free courses available to learn about Linux and I think I’m going to take the Introduction to Linux course. I want to know how the computer works! It would also be nice to be able to help more friends escape the Windows ecosystem especially now that we know Bill Gates himself is allegedly a disgusting sex pest.

The other computer thing I learned is that my favorite ad blocking program, AdGuard, now has an option on Linux. You do have to pay for this one but it prevents ads and trackers from downloading at all, and you can install it on all kinds of devices. I did have to be brave and use the terminal to install it, but their site had instructions and it all worked fine!

Icelandic

I am currently digging into a new Wikipedia category for my Icelandic studies (and I thought I mentioned this before but couldn’t find it, so forgive me if I am repeating myself). I’m working on translating articles about Icelandic women into English and I’ve started with the “Icelandic women by century” categories, which currently has me writing about a bunch of rich ladies and abbesses (sometimes both at once!) from the 15th century. Some of them are badass, like Ólöf Loftsdóttir who got kidnapped by Scottish pirates, had her ransom paid by the Danish king, then went back to Iceland to help keep the English off its shores! Solveig Þorleifsdóttir got excommunicated from the Catholic church. The reasons are not totally clear to me but it seems like she was being loud and stubborn (relatable). The only bummer about working on these subjects is that a lot of what we know about these women is who their husband(s) and children were, and who inherited their money. It’s been a little difficult to purposely ignore articles about the men who intersect with these women because I do really like to complete a set and it feels like I’m leaving holes in the story. However, Wikipedia has way more content about men (according to a 2023 study, only about 20 percent of biographical articles were about women), so I have to remind myself that I am simply prioritizing women at the moment. The men can be someone else’s problem.

Doing Stuff

Last weekend we saw Sacramento Ballet’s performance of Sleeping Beauty. I went into it having seen the Disney movie maybe once and not knowing much else, but it’s fairly thin on plot: the princess is born and everyone dances about it, she turns 16 and we dance some more, she gets cursed to sleep (sad dancing), then the prince wakes her and everyone dances in honor of their nuptials. I was surprised to find that I was familiar with a number of pieces from this ballet because my ballet teacher uses it for her students all the time! So that was a fun little surprise. I really liked how they used the costumes in the performance to show how time had passed; the first act has big 17th-century outfits, but after Aurora’s 100-year nap, the dancers appear in Rococo fashions.

Kitchen Witchery

I’ve been keeping it fairly basic lately. I tried this recipe for chicken arroz rojo, which I am calling “Mexican inspired” and not strictly Mexican food (this is a NYT recipe after all). I added a lot more seasoning and served it with corn cake and some roasted acorn squash. It was good and it was easy. I tried a new soup recipe: curried coconut and red lentil, which we liked. I made some beet couscous with feta (recipe from Ruffage). I liked it but didn’t love it, but the point was to eat an extra vegetable so mission accomplished. Finally, I made a meal of tri-tip, mashed potatoes, asparagus, and rolls (the roll recipe is from The Bread Bible but the rest is just freestyle), which Kirk said was visually impressive (and also delicious), so I am sharing so you can all be stunned by my craftswomanship.

a plate with sweet corn cake, roasted acorn squash, and a rice, bean, and chicken casserole — mexican-inspired meal

a bowl of red lentil soup, alongside beet cous cous topped with feta and a spiced nut mixture, and a naan — mexican-inspired meal

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Kirk bought some catnip bubbles thinking Fritz would be delighted and leaping around after them. Alas, Fritz is afraid of the bubbles.

Fritz the cat in his play tube with only his head visible. There is a solitary bubble on the carpet in front of the tube. Fritz is concerned — fearing the bubble

Fritz the cat, in one of my sweaters, with his face and front paw visible through the collar — fearing the bubble

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: February 8, 2026

Posted on February 8, 2026 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. I hope the news is not making you completely insane this week (but that may be asking too much). I, personally, am crashing out about it (keep reading to learn more lol).

Before getting into the heavy stuff, might I once again recommend you join me on chess.com (website or app!)? I’ve been learning to play chess with my friend Lacy and we are gradually recruiting more people to play with us. It’s actually a lot of fun. Playing chess on my phone has the added benefit of keeping me from scrolling social media too much. Why scroll when I could be improving my chess game? You can add me as a friend! My user name is linzmatic.

Current Events

I’ve recently witnessed a rash of online commentary on various accounts to the tune of “I liked you before you got political!” Leaving aside that comments like this betray an utter lack of literacy when they appear as, say, responses to an environmental activist drag queen (how in the world could this be read as apolitical?), there is no action on this earth that is not political. If you think you’re “not political,” this is a sign that your politics completely align with the status quo. The status quo, too, is political, but it has been rendered invisible to many. As Ursula Le Guin said, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.” That is to say, choosing to not engage with politics is a way of ignoring the inescapable-seeming nature of the status quo. It is easier to close one’s eyes and tune out.

Unfortunately for all of us, the world’s wealthiest assholes are political beings. They are spending their time and immense resources on manipulating the world in ways that support their political goals. That’s not necessarily news, but the Department of Justice’s recent publication of another set of the “Epstein files” has furnished receipts that suggest all manner of political manipulation, far beyond the normal rich people activity of simply donating money to politicians. While the files do give us a lot more information, before we continue I must note that we have known Epstein was trash for a long time. However, to reckon with that, our culture would have to take women’s accounts of abuse seriously and we don’t really do that here.

the DOJ website with the Epstein documents ironically prompts users to verify that they are over 18 — And they say irony is dead

Journalists and researchers are starting to piece together information based on the latest releases. One of the most succinct and damning pieces I’ve read so far about Epstein and friends’ political manipulation comes from a recent edition of Garbage Day titled Here’s how Epstein broke the internet. Epstein seems to have convinced Christopher Poole, the founder of internet hellsite 4chan to have a board for political discussion. This may sound harmless, but 4chan has long been the patient zero for basically all of the worst things that worm their way into the wider internet (for example, Gamergate, probably all of the incel subculture, and Q Anon). It’s truly not an exaggeration to say that 4chan is the backbone of the worst of internet culture. Hearing that Epstein may have been involved in stoking the anger of disaffected young men online is completely wild and, indeed, very bad news.

Not to sound too conspiracy-brained myself, but let us reflect on the fact that the conspiracy theory of Q Anon arose from 4chan, on the very portion of the forum that Epstein convinced Poole to keep. In case you forgot about this, Q Anon is, per the BBC, a “completely unfounded” theory that “President Trump is waging a secret war against elite Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media.” We know Trump is the king of projecting; he loves to attribute his own wrongdoing to his opponents, like when he sued Hillary Clinton, “accusing them of trying to rig the 2016 US presidential election by linking his campaign to Russia.” Yet, we have evidence that the Trump campaign interacted with Russia in an attempt to swing the election. So it does feel plausible to me that he might be in league with political operatives that would seed a conspiracy theory that the Clintons and the Democrats are committing depraved sex crimes to create cover for his own depraved sex crimes. We spent the last ten years like “man, these people sound nuts! There’s no pedophile sex ring being run out of a D.C. pizza parlor!” But, uh, “Buried in all the email correspondence was a detail complicating the cultural archaeology of Pizzagate: The word pizza appeared 911 times as of February 2, though 60 references have since been removed.” That Vanity Fair article quotes a Reddit user who says “QAnon was an op to hide this shit in plain sight and make anyone who said anything about it sound like a lunatic.” and I’m frankly inclined to agree at this point.

Of course, Epstein’s activity was not limited to manipulating sad boys on the internet. The newly released files allegedly (everything here is alleged; don’t sue me) connect Epstein to huge number of influential people, to the point that I’m wondering how much of our culture was not created or influenced by sex offenders of the worst order. Wired has a rundown of some of the tech elites apparently involved with Epstein (not merely mentioned in the documents) including Bill Gates (founder of Microsoft), Peter Thiel (creator of PayPal and Palantir), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (creators of Google), and Reid Hoffman (founder of cursed website LinkedIn, among other things). Beyond technology, noted linguist and leftist Noam Chomsky is involved in some way and, in one of his messages, he stated that there is a “hysteria that has developed about abuse of women.” Ah, yes, we’re hysterical about the fact that “Nearly 1 in 3 women … have experienced partner or sexual violence during their lifetime.” Matt Groening, the man behind The Simpsons, took a ride on Epstein’s private plane and got a massage of his “crusty” feet. New-age author and University of California professor Deepak Chopra has a number of sickening exchanges with Epstein on the record. Famed author of Harry Potter Joanne Rowling also seems to be entangled in some way. There’s also Jay-Z in there and even Stephen fucking Hawking is one the record as participating in an “underage orgy” on the island (though the Hawking news came out some years ago now). This is to say nothing of the many politicians mentioned in the documents.

Beyond the obvious horrors of the abuse Epstein and everyone else involved allegedly carried out, I am stuck on the idea that so much of our culture has been created and maintained by the most depraved people on the planet. Epstein and everyone in his network are just one cultural node (albeit one that is apparently very large and powerful); we see powerful cultural icons outed as sexual assaulters all the time. Just last year Sean Combs (aka Diddy) was tried for sex trafficking and more. In my neck of the cultural woods, Neil Gaiman was accused of awful sexual misconduct and Joss Whedon has been outed as a creep, for just two examples of this happening in nerd culture. This shit is happening constantly. Stories help us figure out what kind of people we want to be and these are people telling stories that we incorporate into our sense of who we are. And yet, so many of our stories are coming from people who have so little regard for people—women, in particular. How has building our sense of self on the cultural output of these people affected how we see ourselves? Each other? What stories might we be telling instead if all the world’s rapists, sexual menaces, traffickers, and various sickos (derogatory) were not so heavily involved in creating the narrative of who we are as a society? Who might we be if our biggest cultural influences came from people who respected the autonomy of others?

Gif from TV show "The Good Place" of Elanor declaring "This is the bad place!" — The Bad Place

Coming back around, I would also like to know if anyone has checked in on Q Anon lately? You would think that this would be a big moment for them! After all, these people believed so hard in the Democrats, and the Clintons specifically, being baby-eating Statan-worshippers that some of them attacked the capitol building on January 6 in a failed coup attempt. However, The New York Times is reporting that “much of QAnon’s response to Washington’s Epstein excitement has been strangely muted, even dismayed,” which would be kind of funny if it wasn’t actually completely depressing. Unfortunately, as Mike Rothschild, the author of the book on the Q Anon cult notes, people who believe this will not change their minds when presented with new evidence that contradicts their narrative that Trump will save us from the cabal of baby-eaters, noting “They just sweep it away. There’s nothing Trump can do that will lose these people’s loyalty. Whatever his involvement is, they just pretend it’s not there.”

Part of the problem with getting these true believers to admit that their hero could be part of the pedophile sex cult that they’re so opposed to is that they are unwilling to cancel (if you will) their own guy. That’s why we see so many right-wingers online yelling at the rest of us “and what will you do if the CLINTONS are in there!!??” Man, I don’t fucking care if the Clintons are in there! If someone is committing atrocities, they are dead to me. That’s all I need to know to not support them. I will not support a rapist, sexual assaulter, pedophile, or baby-eater (Satan-worshippers I’m okay with though. They’re not hurting anyone). If that person was someone I looked up to or whose work I loved before I knew of their misdeeds? Well, I’ll be sad for what we lost and mad for being duped, but they’re gone. To me, this is the bare fucking minimum: don’t rape people. If we can’t stop engaging with and spending money on the cultural output of rapists, how can we expect them to stop? I can’t personally force them to face consequences but you can believe I’m never going to watch another episode of The Simpsons or buy a Neil Gaiman book again. I know this doesn’t hurt their bottom line very much but maybe if I tell my friends and they tell their friends, then a few people will join me and something will happen. If there aren’t legal consequences for doing literally the worst crimes we can imagine, then at the very least we can make shame great again.

This is also why it’s so maddening to see that the Biden had all of this information and, apparently or at least from the outsider’s perspective, did very little with it. Federal prosecutors had access to this information at least since 2020 when Ghislaine Maxwell was charged with crimes. Although we might assume they had access to it sooner since Epstein was charged with “multiple counts of unlawful sex with a minor” in 2006, which is back when Obama was president! We can’t say that the government did nothing because Maxwell is currently behind bars, although she was moved to a minimum-security prison after asserting in 2025 that Trump was not involved in any of the crimes. If Biden had truly wanted to prevent a second Trump presidency, why not use this information to start going after these people? Again, maybe he tried and we simply didn’t know but it’s hard to imagine that literally nothing came of the thousands of files the DOJ has on the subject of Epstein and his many associates. I think this also connects to why some people refuse to believe that this is real or serious. There’s a popular belief that, if it were true, someone in charge would do something (an idea that Sarah Kendzior has written about at length in They Knew). I’m not suggesting in any way that Biden was in on the scheme, but I do think it is important to ask why the top levels of government would ignore ongoing, systematic sexual abuse. It could be money. It could be that too many people from both major political parties are involved and the mess would ruin too many reputations. I don’t have that answer and I’m not sure it’s something we will ever get an answer for.

Finally, I’ve been reflecting on the question of whether being disgustingly wealthy makes people depraved, or if the type of people willing to do what it takes to amass a billion dollars were depraved to begin with (some are born depraved, some become depraved, and some have depravity thrust upon them?). This is really me asking: why does this keep happening? Maybe to start, we should make it illegal for any single person to have a billion dollars. Once you hit $999,999,999, the rest automatically becomes taxes and you get a lifetime achievement award for amassing wealth. They can have a bar mitzvah-like party about it and everything. Unfortunately, the lunatics are currently running the asylum so I know that’s not going to happen anytime soon, but I can dream about at least carrying out the mildest interventions to prevent future horrors.

Tweet from @Whatapityonyou reading "Going to my little job while pedophiles run the world and masked men rampage through our streets kidnapping children because my health insurance is tied to my job and I have to pay my bills"

Books and Other Words

Cover for The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow shown on kobo ereader — The Everlasting

I loved The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. It’s a story about two people being forced into a time loop by a would-be queen who is desperate to make history into a “past worth remembering” so their otherwise unremarkable country will have a “future worth fighting for.” The main characters are Owen, a historian who studies his country’s past, and Una, a knight from the country’s legendary age. Their stories become hopelessly intertwined as Owen is repeatedly forced back to the past to help make Una’s story as legendary as possible so it can be used to fan the flames of nationalism later on. I loved the story for its own sake—lovers bound to find each other through time and yet not able to remember each other—but I also loved it because it’s very much a story for the time we’re living through. Harrow’s clear point of view that the story we tell ourselves about who we are and what kind of country we live in shapes how we behave and what we are willing to permit from our leaders. Are we going to war in service of a glorious past? Or are we content to live well and find love without necessarily being heroes in a powerful nation?

cover for Death Valley: A Novel shown on Kobo ereader — Death Valley

Melissa Broder’s Death Valley is about a woman dealing with anticipatory grief over her dad’s death and her emotions regarding her husband’s disability. It’s also very funny. The protagonist heads from L.A. to Death Valley to get some clarity ostensibly to research the “desert section” of her novel but in reality to get away from her big feelings. On the recommendation from one of the employees at the Best Western she’s staying at, she goes on a hike where she encounters what can only be described as a magical cactus, although it’s unclear if the cactus is real or not. Actually, it’s unclear how much of the story is “real” at all, and the whole thing has a magical realism bent to it. I liked Broder’s writing style a lot but I guess I was not mentally prepared for the fantastical and mystical aspects of this book, so that felt a little weird and caught me off guard. Maybe getting lost on a wild trek through the dessert and hallucinating(?) is the way to come to terms with one’s grief and discover some empathy and compassion. Who am I to question these methods? Maybe more people need to get lost in the desert.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Understanding Comorbidities in Hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome: Could a Viral Infection Lead to a Diagnosis? via PubMed. I don’t usually share academic papers but this one is important! The authors found that people with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (hEDS) were more likely to get long covid than people without hEDS: 3.99% of the hEDS versus 0.97% of the controls “had documentation of long covid.” I don’t have hEDS, but I am hypermobile and these conditions share a lot of similarities. This makes me glad that I’ve been doing my best to avoid covid; I may be at higher risk!
ICE Agents Whine That They Aren’t Getting Their Massive Bonuses via The New Republic. You love to see it. It’s completely predictable that the administration that lies about everything also lied about handing out $50,000 to everyone who signed up to be a war criminal.
“Everything We Do Matters.” Minneapolis’s Moon Palace Books is a Hub For Anti-ICE Resistance via Literary Hub. I was going to write about ICE this week too but I realized I only had it in me to take on one story at a time, so today please content yourself with this. Local bookshops are important! They are part of our community.
Resolutionize Your Community Involvement via Group Hug! I really liked this piece on how we think about community involvement. Maybe if we treated getting involved like we did New Year’s resolutions (telling friends, taking time to reflect and celebrate), we might start to see “community participation as desirable and possible, not obligatory and amorphous.”

Media

Kirk and I watched the Chernobyl miniseries which is not quite a documentary, but it is very informative. It’s a historical dramatization of the events surrounding the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. I quickly realized I didn’t actually know anything about Chernobyl other than the fact that it exploded, so I learned quite a lot about it and about how nuclear power and radiation works. It was quite unsettling to watch, so I only recommend it if you’re in a mindset to deal with that. The soundtrack they scored the show with generated this creeping unease that, coupled with the subject matter, made it difficult to get through at parts. I thought it was very well done overall and it is very interesting to see how humans and technology can work together to do something awful.

Rampant Consumerism

I have been enjoying my water aerobics class and am going to keep doing it (and indeed have signed up for a second class since there’s another pool exercise class right before the one I’ve been taking) so I had to get some stuff to make it easy and comfortable for me. I really like the towel I bought from Sand Cloud. It’s big and it dries really quickly. I also got some shoes to wear in the water. I found these from Astral that you can wear in or out of the pool, which I like because it’s one less thing to fuck around with when I’m coming and going. I never really wear sweat pants but it is very cold at night after getting out of the pool, so I got these awesome and cozy ones from Maya Kern and I highly recommend them. Finally, because the local pool is heavily chlorinated, I am now using this Suit Solutions stuff that you add to the laundry to get the chlorine miasma out of everything. It works really well! Now you know all the secrets and are ready to take water aerobics with me (lol).

Kitchen Witchery

This week, I made a very good baked potato soup that Kirk said resembled mashed potatoes (he’s not wrong). Then, I changed up one of my regular recipes, gnocchi with brussels sprouts and brown butter, just a little to add some beans and round out the dish. It was good and I had that for lunch a few days this week. I don’t have a very good picture of this but we also enjoyed a beef pot pie (I forgot to take a picture of the inside but just imagine thick stew with a pie crust on top; recipe from The Harvest Baker).

I mentioned last time that I wanted to experiment more with the peanut butter cookie recipe and I did! I used a peanut-pecan butter and added candied pecans to the dough, which was just as good as the original peanut variation. I have some chocolate-almond butter in the cupboard, so I think I want to try one more version with that and some chocolate chips. Finally, because it felt necessary, I made some frosted brownies (recipe from 100 Cookies, same as the peanut butter cookies). It was so good. You might think brownies don’t need frosting and, sure, they don’t need it, but sometimes it is the right thing to do.

a bowl of potato soup topped with fried potato skins, bacon, cheese, and green onion — baked potato soup

a bowl of gnocchi, brussels sprouts, and beans topped with parmsean — baked potato soup

Cat Therapy

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

Fritz the cat lying on my chest, curled up in a ball with his feet and head on my hand — Ball mode

Fritz the cat lounging inside a sweatshirt. His tail is sticking out and curled around his body — Ball mode

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: January 25, 2026

Posted on January 25, 2026 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. I hope everyone is surviving January. I hope we are finding opportunities to be whimsical little creatures despite the horrors around us and appreciating time with our friends. So much sucks right now and I think it’s so important to, while battling the horrors, put some effort being into weirdos and appreciating life.

That said: on to the horrors (but at least there are cat photos are the end).

Current Events

The events have been eventful. I may have been a little too cynical in my last post, but I do still stand by the notion that much of what is happening now was easily foreseen and, indeed, was foreseen by experts in authoritarianism like Sarah Kendzior. That said, things are bad. Just yesterday ICE agents in Minnesota shot and killed a man who was recording them. This man, Alex Pretti, was not threatening them in any way, but multiple ICE agents held him down and then killed him. “Law enforcement” officers do not have the right to murder people. That’s not how this is supposed to work. Yet, the country I’m living in has, for years, allowed officers to get away with murder; it’s only recently that they’ve moved on to shooting white people in broad daylight. Consider: in 2020, Police in Louisville shot and killed Breonna Taylor in her own home. The same year, a police officer knelt on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes, killing him. The violence we’re seeing now is the result of unchecked state violence. Police violence against black people in the last ten to fifteen years was a test in how far the state could take things without facing serious backlash. Despite many people fighting mightily, the state has learned they can go very far.

The whole point of the current iteration of ICE is to take all of the Proud Boys and white supremacist shitheads who love Trump and the idea of a white ethnostate and give them a gun and a fake uniform and let them go to town. The same sort of people who saw to it that Heather Hayer was killed while counterprotesting the Unite the Right ralley in Charlottesville in 2017 are now people with the government’s blessing to terrorize us in an official capacity. The House of Representatives voted this week to allocate $63 billion to homeland security, “including some $10 billion directly to ICE” (the Senate is claiming they will block funding for this, but we’ll see what happens). The only reason to put more money into ICE is to terrorize the population, tear families apart, and put people in detention centers where people may simply go missing. As a post I saw on Bluesky today reads, “ICE is going to continue to kill people because the purpose of a system is what it does.” What other reason is there to fund ICE specifically (I will remind the reader that ICE was only established in 2003), if not to promote state violence against its people.

We’re in our own Years of Lead and unfortunately, the only way out is through.

Do Something for Minnesota

For those of us with a burning need to do something, here are some fundraisers/mutual aid requests from the brave people of Minnesota currently on the front lines against ICE:

Stand With Minnesota has a big list of mutual aid funds in many categories including rent relief, pet support, and fundraisers for various supplies.
Flourish Placemaking Collective has a mutual aid fund helping impacted community members get what they need so they can stay safe from ICE.
Powderhorn Families mutual aid fund is organized by a neighborhood group to help people pay rent and utilities.
Here’s a short thread of more local organizations doing work on the ground with explanations about what they’re doing.
How To Help if You are Outside Minnesota has some ideas for things to do beyond sending money, like contacting your representatives and hassling businesses that support ICE.

Do Something in Your Community

We must all be ready for these ICE incursions to come to us. It’s clear that this is not going to be the end of it, even though it is supremely idiotic to invade winter people during winter. Here in Sacramento, NorCal Resist is the local group organizing rapid response to ICE and doing a lot of other work to support immigrants. If you live elsewhere, you certainly have a local group doing this work. If you don’t: start one!

If you don’t want to join a group, I invite you to think about the technology you’re using and how it’s feeding into the surveillance apparatus. 404 Media published a big piece on how Palantir is weaponizing all the data they have collected from our phones and is sharing it with ICE so they can decide which neighborhoods to raid. A big list of apps that leak your data was also published recently, so it’s a good idea to check if any of your weird random game apps are tattling on you (Candy Crush is). Check your app permission settings and turn off as many as you can if you can’t delete the app. If you’ve been using a Ring camera, now is the time to get rid of it. Ring is partnering with Flock to to share footage with law enforcement. Finally, here’s a map of businesses supporting ICE. Let’s shop local and avoid them! It’s going to take many diverse actions from a large number of people to limit the amount of data companies have to use against us and show that supporting ICE is a bad business decision.

Books and Other Words

book cover for Katabasis, shown on Kobo ereader — Katabasis

R. F. Kuang’s latest novel, Katabasis, is another entry in the “grad school is awful” genre (see also: Kuang’s previous book, Babel), with this book literally featuring a journey into hell to retrieve the main character’s PhD advisor. To be fair, the protagonist is in graduate school for magic, so a sojourn to hell isn’t completely beyond the pale, but the metaphors throughout hell’s various courts truly emphasize the infernal nature of higher education. As Alice and Peter move through hell, they encounter the dead doing hard time for various sins and by “hard time” I mean that everyone has to write and submit a thesis to get out of hell and reincarnate. I really liked this book. I appreciated the tension of the characters trying to figure out how to be honest with themselves and each other about what they actually want after years of submitting themselves to their academic careers and abusive advisor. I think everything Kuang writes is brilliant but, considering that she herself is currently working on her PhD I think we do have to ask: girl, are you okay?

cover of Cinder House shown on Kobo ereader — Cinder House

Cinder House by Freya Marske is a Cinderella retelling, in which Ella is a bisexual ghost. After Ella’s stepmother poisons both Ella and her father, Ella dies and finds herself reawakened as a ghost bound to her family home. In fact, as a ghost she is the house and the house is her; she can touch and move things within the house and she feels pain when someone damages it. Her step-family immediately start using this against her, so Ella is forced to spend her afterlife cooking, cleaning, and otherwise maintaining a home. What’s even the point of dying if you have to do all that? When a storm blows a roof tile off, Ella discovers that she’s able to leave the property if she carries the tile, but she magically reappears in the house at midnight, no matter where she has gone. There is, of course, a ball—it is a Cinderella tale—and Ella gets magicked into human form so she can attend the festivities. I will refrain from saying more and spoiling it, but this is a short, very fun and satisfying read that I recommend!

cover of All of US Murderers featuring a gothic house looming in the background and a messy wet cat of a man plus a regular, put-together guy in the foreground — All of US Murderers

All of Us Murderers by KJ Charles is a historical romance set in a spooky gothic mansion with hateful relatives bickering over inheritance (the scariest thing of all). I don’t usually like scary stuff, but I didn’t think this was too frightening, and I knew that, given the constraints of the genre, there would be a logical explanation for everything. The story focuses on Zeb, whose ADHD ways (as we are meant to interpret them; they weren’t diagnosing people with ADHD in 1910 or whatever) irritate his apparently respectable family members. Zeb’s cousin has invited the family to his weird house in the country and told them that whoever marries his ward will get all the inheritance. Of course, things are not as they seem, etc. The plot also involves Zeb’s reconciliation with his ex, Gideon, who his cousin hired as a secretary. I don’t want to spoil anything but I did enjoy this book a lot. I thought the way the author handled the main character’s ADHD traits was both realistic and compassionate. Something nice about historical fiction, and it is true of this book, is we can put ourselves in the past and imagine creating a fairer world. We all want to think that we wouldn’t be terrible just because there were terrible elements in our society (ahem), and giving readers a way to imagine that for themselves is joyful and a good way to train our minds to behave well in the present.

cover for The New Age of Sexism shown on Kobo ereader — The New Age of Sexism

The New Age of Sexism: How Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny by Laura Bates investigates how the same old misogyny is present in some of the latest tech, considering the impact of products like AI and sex robots. Bates explains that “the inequalities and oppression of our current society” are being coded into new technologies that are extremely efficient at violating women’s privacy. For example, there are now many sites where people can feed in photos of someone and get AI-generated nudes of that person and, unfortunately, “research suggests that 96 percent of deepfakes are nonconsensual pornography, 99 percent of which features women.” It is terrible that our society has developed new tools that seem to exist exclusively to terrorize women. Furthermore, the burden for dealing with these images is entirely on the victim—police are unhelpful and generally don’t understand the internet and websites only remove images if the victim specifically requests it. As Bates puts it, “by making these technologies widely accessible, we as a society are giving men a powerful delusion of ownership over the bodies of any women they choose.” One argument that proponents of letting men run wild online with chatbot girlfriends or sex dolls is that it gives them a place to play out their violent fantasies so they don’t bring them into the real world. The idea is that an “inanimate, unharmable substitute [bears] the brunt of male rage and violence while the rest of us escape,” but this does not prove true. These behaviors leak into the real world and more likely serve as a training ground or a “prototype,” which is why these technologies are a source of concern.

What I did not like about this book is that Bates puts way too much stock into some of this technology. She has an entire chapter about the Metaverse, which is a product that almost no one used and that Meta has just stopped developing. Granted, Bates could not have seen that particular detail coming, but the Metaverse was never once popular. Bates also either does not know or does not address the fact that chatbots are not truly intelligent, but are in fact glorified autocomplete engines known as large language models (LLMs). In several vignettes, she puts on different personas to ask chatbots questions to elicit sexist answers, then later points out the sexism and gives the bot a chance to “explain” itself. The bot invariably “apologies,” but it isn’t self-aware, it’s just stringing together probable sequences of words. While, yes, all these AI chatbots are certainly peddling in stereotypes, the answer isn’t a bot trained on a feminist dataset (as one company mentioned in the book offers). We need to stop asking questions of the Machine that Lies and then being shocked by anything it says. That said, I do agree with Bates overall that it is critical to understand how our culture’s sexism and rampant violence against women is being coded into new technologies.

Rampant Consumerism

Since I’m done wearing braces but now have a retainer to wear for the rest of my life, I spent a little time looking into the best way to keep it clean; cleaning it under the tap with my toothbrush has been both annoying and only partially effective. I bought one of these ultrasonic cleaners and so far I like it. It works pretty well but I do still have to knock off just a little gunk with the toothbrush, although that is much better than what I was doing before. I get the feeling that these companies make their money off selling little cleaning tablets, but I read those aren’t necessary and you can add a drop of unscented dish soap in with the retainers to get it clean instead, which is what I’m doing. I guess you could use scented soap but then you’ll have to put something in your mouth that smells like lemon or some shit.

Computer World

I’ve got two things to share for people who are trying to keep corporations from scooping up all their data. First, the State of California now has a website where you can request that data brokers delete your data and stop selling your personal information. Unfortunately, this is only good for California residents, but perhaps other states will join in soon. The second thing is OsmAnd maps, which I am hoping to use as a replacement for Google maps. They use publicly available data from Open Street Map and they work offline! You can download the map for your area and have it handy even without an internet or data connection. I have yet to use it in the wild but I’ve downloaded the app and my local map.

Corporeal Form

About a week and a half ago, I got my doctor to give me another cortisone shot for my knee pain. The first one I had kept me pain-free for about a month, but by the end of December I was in intense pain. With this shot, I was feeling good but then a few days later, I was already in a lot of pain again and I was very discouraged about it. Not coincidentally (and possibly TMI but we have to be able to talk about this stuff!) my period started the same day as the pain! When my period was over, the pain went away! I was conferring with people I know and looking into it a little online and the hormonal changes during menstruation can cause pain flares! Wow, being a lady is full of cool stuff.

Moving It

I started taking a water aerobics class and it’s actually a lot of fun. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but it is nice to be in the pool and jog and jump around in the water. The class is at night and right now it’s cold, so the worst part is getting out of the pool and freezing my ass off, but I have bought some nice sweat pants and I will live.

For anyone looking for a sticker update, my sticker system for exercising is working great. It’s just frivolous enough to motivate me. I do want a sticker, and I won’t get it if I don’t do my stuff. This would not work if I were using something more important. If I told myself I get a special snack after exercising, I would be like “well, that’s a made-up rule and I’m allowed to have a snack anytime, actually.” So, I’ve found a happy medium for how my (autistic and demand-avoidant) brain works. Highly recommended!

paper planner with stickers on each day. Stickers are: a capybara in a bath, a black cat, snowflake, biscuit, a cat with a flower, a ballerina, and a pink sheep unicorn — a January week of stickers

Me in a swimsuit out at the public pool at night before my class — a January week of stickers

Kitchen Witchery

I’ve been back on my beans recently! For lunch last week, I made a batch of polenta and topped that with snowcap beans and a bunch of cheese, inspired by this post from Cheese Sex Death. It was simple and tasty. I was a little late on cooking my lucky new year’s black-eyed peas, but I did get it done this month so I think that still counts. I made black-eyed peas with coconut milk and berebere, then served that over rice and we liked it. I blended all the tomatoes and stuff together before adding the beans because I am fine with tomatoes for flavor but their texture displeases me. I’m also sharing a picture of a grilled cheese because it was a good one and that needs to be celebrated (the bread is two-for-one multigrain loaf in case you’re wondering).

The best thing I made this week was peanut butter cookies. I had been yearning for cookies all day and then made some at like 9:30 at night and I feel like that was a great choice. The recipe is from 100 Cookies and it suggests candying some peanuts to add to the cookie dough, which is a pro move. I want to try the recipe again with some of my fancy peanut butter flavors then add the corresponding nuts. I will report back.

a bowl of polenta topped with brothy beans and a big pile of parmesan cheese — parmesan beans on polenta

a pot of black-eyed peas in an orange-colored coconut and tomato sauce — parmesan beans on polenta

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat leaning against my chest with all four paws in my hand. He has curled himself so his head is upsidedown and his tongue is sticking out. He looks fucking nuts — mountain goat mode

Fritz the cat in his blanket nest. His head is sticking out and he's in the middle of a big yawn with his ears pulled back — mountain goat mode

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: January 11, 2026

Posted on January 11, 2026 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. I don’t know if you’ve been keeping up with the news lately, but 2026 is off to, let’s say, a bumpy start.

Post from @JamieBonkiewicz dated 1/7/2026 reading "Thanks for the free 7-day trial of 2026. I'd like to unsubscribe from whatever the hell this is" — the current mood

I was thinking about what I might say to the news of Trump being a power-hungry piece of shit and starting a war with Venezuela by kidnapping their president (which The New York Times and The Washington Post knew about in advance and simply decided not to report on!). Or what I might say about ICE murdering a woman in Minnesota, the ninth such shooting since September. I don’t really know what to say because I feel like this is what we meant when we said things were going to be bad under Trump. This is what we knew would happen when Congress approved literal billions of dollars for ICE. Paramilitary flunkies are shooting people. Yeah, that’s what they were hired to do. They are supposed to cause unrest so that the government has an excuse to move real troops against the civilian population. Where we are now is the result of a million decisions that let people like Trump off the hook for ever facing a consequence for his actions, or decisions like Biden approving funds for ICE during the interregnum. That’s not to say this is anyone’s fault (it is, perhaps, everyone’s fault) or that it’s not worth being upset about these things (it is), but I think, as horrible a the news as been, there’s a part of me asking “what did you fucking expect?”

I don’t have anything new to offer this week because the advice I have for what we’re going through is advice I have already shared, so here are some links to past posts. Just assume I said it all this week. My views haven’t changed.

Thoughts from right after Trump won the 2024 election, which includes suggestions like “Do not preemptively cede your joy to this political moment,” “Pick one thing in your community that you want to support and volunteer for that,” and “connect with people offline.”
A post from when California was on fire this time last year (isn’t it nice to not be on fire?) and when Facebook basically announced it was killing social media by ending comment moderation. I have some opinions on how to talk to people without a technocratic middleman (great suggestions for when you want privacy).
The emergency kit post. Granted we are not in a natural disaster at the moment but I find that emergency preparedness can be a good outlet for this kind of anxiety!

I truly believe the key to surviving and building a better world is through local community effort. All problems right now are the same problems: a handful of guys have all the world’s money, rich people are operating with impunity. Anything you can do to connect with people in a way that does not involve those guys getting money is a way to rage against the machine. Anyway, enjoy some images:

comic panel with a woman looking out the window at the city skyline and saying "What a stupid time to be alive." — Extremely stupid

two-paneled image of a masked man on top of a tank riding through a bombed-out area. The first says "Hey friend, remember when I told you things were going to get worse?" The second zooms in on the soldier's face and says "They're getting worse now" — Extremely stupid

Books and Other Words

book cover for All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now shown on Kobo ereader — All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now

All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now by Ruby Tandoh is a pulse check on the current state of food culture with, of course, enough history to contextualize how we got here. Tandoh considers trends like boba tea, the tension between cookbooks and online recipes, and the uncanny similarity between how today’s profusion of probiotic beverages is marketed and the ad copy of early sodas like Pepsi and Dr. Pepper. The thesis of the book is aptly summarized in the epilogue, in which Tandoh wonders whether she has “ever had an original craving in my life” (highly unlikely, based on what we learned in the preceding pages). There is a lot on social media and marketing shapes our tastes and our view of what we want, but things like the development of supermarkets themselves and simple product availability were shaping our food-based desires long before Mark Zuckerberg was born. None of this is framed as good or bad, simply the world we’re living in. I thought it was interesting and worth the read.

hardback book: First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Alients — First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens

First Contact: The Story of Our Obsession with Aliens by Becky Ferreira is a book that manages to be both informative and a lot of fun to read. Ferreira works through the cultural history of thinking about and searching for alien life. The book goes through some of the actual science behind the search for life in the universe and the various theories about it, plus talks about the history of the way we think about aliens, including the 20th century’s patient zero: Roswell, New Mexico (which turned out to be debris from a project “designed to detect atmospheric reverberations of nuclear tests within the Soviet Union”). Ferreira maintains a humorous tone throughout the book and is clearly deeply influenced by A Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which I find charming. I also can’t say enough good things about the design of this book. The way the information is organized and laid out is so well done, it’s almost like reading a really nice website or maybe a textbook that doesn’t hate you.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Polymarket turns housing price indices into prediction markets via Parcl partnership via The Block. In the casino-ificiation of our economy, gambling company Polymarket will let people place bets on real estate. Seems like a bad fucking idea to me, but what do I know.
In 2026, We Are Friction-Maxxing via The Cut. In this article, Kathryn Jezer-Morton argues that we all need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. “Tech companies are succeeding in making us think of life itself as inconvenient and something to be continuously escaping from, into digital padded rooms of predictive algorithms and single-tap commands,” she writes. The remedy is “friction-maxxing,” essentially doing things the hard way because they remove the tech-based middleman from our lives. “Friction-maxxing is not simply a matter of reducing your screen time, or whatever. It’s the process of building up tolerance for “inconvenience” (which is usually not inconvenience at all but just the vagaries of being a person living with other people in spaces that are impossible to completely control) — and then reaching even toward enjoyment.” I’m looking forward to implementing a little more necessary friction into my life, although I know I already do some friction-maxed activities like manually importing MP3s onto my phone.
Code is a liability (not an asset) via Pluralistic. I thought this was a very informative piece from Cory Doctorow. Computer code is something that requires maintenance and a good software engineer thinks about ways that code might become deprecated or be vulnerable to attack. Managers demanding that coders increase their coding output using AI are completely ignoring (or unaware) of this and assume that more code means more profits, which Doctorow explains is now the case.
Medieval Friendships: No Girls Allowed via JSTOR Daily. Men used to think that friendship was a special thing that only boys could have, which is truly insane. This made me wonder if the persistent cultural belief that women are bitchy and forever fighting amongst themselves stems from long-dead dudes proclaiming that women just don’t have what it takes to be friends with each other. It’s also wild that friendship has transformed from an innate male quality to something that many view as at least a little gay.
Why people fail at learning languages via Dead Language Society. This article didn’t give me a lot of new information (but I did get some!), but I really like the way Colin Gorrie explains language learning and why it is that so many people get frustrated and quit (vocabulary apps alone cannot sustain you). The gist is “The core activity that builds up your mental representation of the language is decoding messages in the language” but there is a lot of good stuff in this article, so if you’re at all interested in language learning, you should go read it!

Media

Kirk bought me the new Donkey Kong game (Donkey Kong Bananza) for Christmas and I’ve been having a lot of fun playing it. Although I was disappointed at first because it doesn’t really have the feel of a traditional Donkey Kong game; it’s a lot more like Super Mario Odyssey, except that you can punch through just about any material. In this game, you spend a lot of time just smashing stuff. At a certain point you think, “should I smash everything? There could be stuff in there.” And there usually is stuff in there! It’s a perverse incentive. You’re supposed to help whatever creatures inhabit the level and yet you’re smashing their environment to smithereens, but they don’t even seem to care. How badly are they doing that they are willing to trade complete destruction of their home for Donkey Kong’s dubious aid? As usual, I have generated too many existential questions but I guess that’s how I have a good time.

Languages

I announced in my 2026 goals post that I was planning to relearn Arabic and I have been getting into it. It has been interesting to decide how I want to approach my studies since I know what information is important and I know a lot more about learning languages than I did when I started learning Arabic the first time at 18. I feel more freedom to spend time and really learn all the vocabulary and concepts I come across since I’m not worrying about getting my homework done or studying for a test.

I’ve started with a basic textbook that I found for free online (including accompanying audio files!) called Letters and Meanings: Gateway to Arabic. I already know how to read but I am humbling myself and starting at the beginning so I don’t miss anything important. I started taking Arabic class my first semester in college and I had spent the summer before learning the alphabet from a book I bought. I started out class kind of cocky because I was like, I already know how to read. But my over-confident ass forgot to tune back in at the right time and I was scrambling to figure out what was going on by the end of the semester. So, we’re learning from this mistake and taking our time on the introductory materials.

The other thing I’m doing with the benefit of knowing the contours of the language is making a note in my flashcards of each word’s root letters. In Arabic and other Semitic languages, the majority of words are formed from a three-letter root and the language is full of morphological patterns to create multiple words from the same root. Wikipedia has a list of examples with the k-t-b root, which contains words like kitaab (book), maktab (desk), kaatib (writer), etc. When I look up a word, I am always tempted to add every word from its root to my flashcards. This is not practical and probably not useful at this stage, but I yearn to collect the whole set. Instead for now, I’m just adding the root to each card so I can easily connect related words.

Moving It

I have been doing a lot of physical activity over the last few weeks, even without dance class. My sticker-a-day system for sticking to my workout schedule is working great. I want a sticker, what can I say. I’ve been very consistently working on my bar hangs so maybe if I’m lucky I’ll actually be able to hang again by the end of the year (my hopes are modest lol).

I have also been hitting the streets on my unicycle! I mentioned last time that I was struggling to ride. It turns out that I was largely hampered by mechanical issues. I had to get new cranks and pedals since I installed my pedal so badly that it stripped the socket. Once I got the new parts, I went to the local bike shop and asked them to save me from myself. After getting everything set up by a professional, I was able to ride around fairly competently. I can get up and go but my stamina is low. This is probably going to sound stupid to all of you, but did you know it’s actually quite a lot of work to ride a unicycle? I learned how to ride when I was 10 and I did it for most of my life. It did not occur to me that it was going to be so much effort to ride around the neighborhood. Of course, then I got mad again that I was made to feel fat and out of shape as a teenager when I was out there unicycling and juggling my way through entire parades. In any case, it is hard but I am enjoying it. I’ll keep posting updates on my instagram (here’s my latest unicycle update).

Kitchen Witchery

I tried out the NYT recipe for french onion macaroni and cheese on New Year’s Eve. It was very good and it’s exactly how it sounds. It’s definitely not something to put into my regular cooking rotation but I think this is one to make when you have some guests. It’s a big recipe and I ended up eating macaroni all week. I’m not complaining but I did actually get a little sick of it by the end. I revisited the winter squash and rice soup with pancetta, which I like because it’s very easy and tasty and doesn’t require anything special. I still had some turkey broth in the freezer so I used that for the soup and that made it taste really good. Finally, I tried out these buckwheat chocolate chip cookies, which honestly only have a little buckwheat despite the name. I am never willing to chop chocolate into chunks for a cookie recipe, but I feel that the Guittard super cookie chips are basically the same concept without the extra effort. I will make these again.

a bowl of thick macaroni and cheese topped with bits of cheesy toast, with some roasted brussels sprouts piled to the side — french onion macaroni and cheese

a bowl of rice soup with pancetta and butternut squash, topped with a little parsley — french onion macaroni and cheese

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat inside a pair of pants. His face is sticking out but his ears are covered. — this cat yearns to be a nun

Fritz the cat sitting in the windowsill, looking over his shoulder at the camera. His reflection is visible in the perpendicular window — this cat yearns to be a nun

books

2025: The 18th Annual Year in Books

Posted on January 1, 2026 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. Another year of reading is in the books! n 2025, I read 48 books. It was a bit of a light year for reading for me, and this was the least I’ve read since 2021 if you count by number of books (44), or 2016 if you go by page count (16,413). That’s okay! I share these stats not out of self-flagellation but simply because I find it interesting to track the ebb and flow of my reading habits. I spent a lot of reading time this year on Don Quijote, which was not very easy for me to read in Spanish. I also felt like this was another year of having a hard time finding books that really grab my attention. Perhaps the answer is just to read anyway and give less credit to my fickle whims. That said, here are some statistics about my reading in 2025.

Reading Stats

Books finished: 48.
Pages read: 16,490.
Longest book: Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes, 1,216 pages.
Shortest book: The Lover by Marguerite Duras, 128 pages.
Library use: I read 31 library books this year and 17 books from my own collection (plus one book that I borrowed from a friend, if anyone is wondering about that math).
First book: Shoestring Theory by Marina Costa.
Last book: All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now by Ruby Tandoh.
Fiction and non-fiction: I read 20 non-fiction books and 28 fiction books.
Most-read authors: The author I read the most books by was Deborah Harkness; I read all five of the books currently in her All Souls series. Otherwise, I didn’t have a lot of repeat authors. I read three books by Davinia Evans and two by Alexandra Rowland.
Gender gap: I read 34 books by women, 11 by men, 1 by a non-binary person, and one anthology with text from both men and women.
Other languages: I read two books in Spanish, which doesn’t sound like a lot but one was Don Quijote! The other was La nostalgia de la Mujer Anfibio, which I finished way back in January.

Here are some of my favorites from the year.

cover for the book Shoestring Theory shown on kobo ereader — Shoestring Theory

book cover of Stop Me If You've Heard This One — Shoestring Theory

The Books of 2025

Here is the full list of this year’s books! If you want to see what I read in previous years, you can click the books of the year tag to see all my past annual book posts.

Title	Author
Shoestring Theory	Mariana Costa
La nostalgia de la Mujer Anfibio	Cristina Sánchez-Andrade
Beans: A History	Ken Albala
The Crescent Moon Tearoom	Stacy Sivinski
The Notorious Sorcerer	Davina Evans
Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care	Kelly Hayes, Mariame Kaba
A Memory Called Empire	Arkady Martine
Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944–1956	Anne Applebaum
A Desolation Called Peace	Arkady Martine
Bi: Notes for a Bisexual Revolution	Shiri Eisner
The Coin	Yasmin Zaher
The Ghost Bride	Yangsze Choo
Women in the Valley of the Kings: The Untold Story of Women Egyptologists in the Gilded Age	Kathleen Sheppard
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit	Jeanette Winterson
A Conspiracy of Truths	Alexandra Rowland
Space Opera	Catherynne Valente
Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One	Kristen Arnett
Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation	Alexei Yurchak
Living in Your Light	Abdellah Taïa
Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day	Peter Ackroyd
Space Oddity	Catherynne Valente
A Choir of Lies	Alexandra Rowland
Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia	Kate Manne
Claiming the B in LGBT: Illuminating the Bisexual Narrative	Kate Harrad
The Lover	Marguerite Duras
There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America	Brian Goldstone
Cults Like Us: Why Doomsday Thinking Drives America	Jane Borden
Intuitive Eating for Diabetes: The No Shame, No Blame, Non-Diet Approach to Managing Your Blood Sugar	Janice Dada
Disco Witches of Fire Island	Blair Fell
Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection	John Green
Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream	Megan Greenwell
Foundation	Isaac Asimov
All Our Families: Disability Lineage and the Future of Kinship	Jennifer Natalya Fink
One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This	Omar El Akkad
Little Bosses Everywhere: How the Pyramid Scheme Shaped America	Bridget Read
Shadow Baron	Davinia Evans
Pink-pilled: Women and the far right	Lois Shearing
A Discovery of Witches	Deborah Harkness
Rebel Blade	Davinia Evans
The Bruising of Qilwa	Naseem Jamnia
Shadow of Night	Deborah Harkness
The Book of Life	Deborah Harkness
The Destruction of Palestine Is the Destruction of the Earth	Andreas Malm
Time’s Convert	Deborah Harkness
Don Quijote de la Mancha	Miguel de Cervantes
The Black Bird Oracle	Deborah Harkness
All Consuming: Why We Eat the Way We Eat Now	Ruby Tandoh

weekly update

Life Continues: Farewell 2025 and Onward to 2026

Posted on December 31, 2025 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies, another year has gone by! 2025 was, uh, quite a year. I think a defining issue of my year was dealing with my knee (and other health issues). I know, another rotten year of figuring out a health problem, just when I thought there was nothing left. My right knee, previously believed to be the “good” knee, started giving me trouble during the summer and it was downhill from there. Learning that I have to confine myself to low-impact activity forever is a huge drag—this can’t be overstated—but it is leading me to some interesting places as I try to get creative within these limitations.

This is the first year in a little while that my end-of-year post doesn’t conclude with “keep doing what I’m doing.” I mean, I’m doing a lot of good stuff and will keep doing many things, but I’ve got some other ideas too. I feel more able to think about how I structure my time since I’m having to make changes for health reasons. I really have to rethink how I approach moving my body, both in that I have to do a lot of regular exercise to keep my knee from getting worse and that I can’t do anything too strenuous that would aggravate it (maybe I should be taking up tightrope walking with these competing demands [joking!]). I have to keep up with doing my PT exercises regularly and do what I’ve been calling my “boring” exercise, stuff like walking or riding a bike. I’ve realized boring exercise is not going to work for me. I just started unicycling again (as discussed in my last post) and I’m hoping I can do that instead of walking or biking. The other thing I am working on right now is regaining the ability to hang from a bar. If I can hang from the bar I can start doing interesting bar exercises but first, one must hang. I’m also going to try an aqua aerobics class, since apparently Elk Grove has a whole bunch. The only thing I am wary of is ear infections, but surely I could go “aqua jogging” without too much trouble?

I bought a ton of stickers (from a brand called Stickii) and am currently rewarding myself with a sticker when I do my boring exercise, bar hang practice, and PT exercise according to my schedule (I’m not doing everything every day). I do find this strangely motivational. I’m just sticking them in my day planner to enjoy. Did you know you can just give yourself a sticker for any reason? Try it out!

a pile of sticker sheets of many varieties including snowflakes, ladies with swords, capybaras, popsicles, unicorns, and cats with flowers — just a whole bunch of stickers

Daily planner with a small sticker on four of the days in a row: a rainbow-striped unicorn, snowflake, popsicle, and orange cat with a dandelion — just a whole bunch of stickers

I’ve been thinking about other ways I use my time too. In 2025, I started learning some German thinking we would go to Eurovision in 2026 (alas, we have canceled the plans). Since I’ve been working on both Spanish and Icelandic for a while now, I kind of assumed I did not have room in my life for actively studying another language, but considering I found time to learn German, that was an incorrect assumption. With that in mind, I am going to spend some time this year digging back into Arabic. I have a whole-ass bachelor’s degree in the language, but barely remember anything. It sucks! I want to use the language I studied for years because I think it’s cool. I will discuss the Arabic studies more in a future post, but for now I am simply announcing my intentions to all. Don’t worry, I’m not giving up on Spanish or Icelandic. I’m just adding one more language into the mix.

Here are some other things on my mind heading into 2026:

Read more! It felt like I hardly spent any time reading in 2025 and I hate that. I’m not necessarily talking about hitting some number of books or pages but I just want to spend more time reading because that makes me feel more like myself. One good thing about doing my boring exercise is that I have a stationary bike in the garage and I can at least read books while I do it.
Do some knitting. The battle with carpal tunnel continues but I think I am slowly figuring out how to knit in a way that is less aggravating. I’ve been adjusting how I tension and trying out a Norwegian knitting thimble to take some of the pressure off. I think if I want to get any knitting done, I have to try doing a little every day, which is exactly not how my brain operates. I naturally want to do things in around three-hour chunks because it’s hard to switch tasks and get dialed into something.
Try new recipes from my cookbooks. I am so tempted to make a new year’s resolution like “cook through [cookbook name] cookbook” or “cook a new recipe every week,” but I know I simply will not do that. There will be weeks that I won’t want to do anything and I am not convinced that discipline is these kinds of things is all that worthwhile. In any case, I have many books with recipes I want to try so I hope to explore more of that this year.
Find opportunities to hang out in public. This is a surprising one but hear me out. I’ve been getting a lot of social time from going to dance class, but now I’m going to just one per week and quitting my other two, so I need to make sure I get out of the house. Maybe I am going to hang out at a cafe and read a book. Maybe I will make more time to visit my friends. I don’t know! I also am reflecting on the fact that part of what I always found fun about unicycling and juggling was hanging out with other people while doing it. If you want to come hang out and unicycle/juggle, let me know! I can teach you if you want to learn!
I don’t really know how to express this one very well but in a time of authoritarianism and oppression, I want to lean into being a little weirdo, a bit of a jester, just a silly guy. I’m not sure what form that will take but I am going to be looking for ways to embrace whimsy and weirdness as often as possible. Maybe I’ll get a silly hat to wear while I unicycle.

Finally, here is everyone’s favorite tradition: my annual mood board!

A collage of images to set the vibe for 2026. Including a fake magazine cover that says "you don't have to be good at stuff all the time", a "make soup not war" poster, a medieval-style turtle illustration with the caption "I am weird and I like it," a dolphin with a lisa frank style background that says "next year I will be more insane," and others — 2026 mood board

2025 Highlights

I guess I’m doing this post backwards since we are not moving in chronological order, but that is what felt right this time. I assembled a list of the year’s major happenings and was about to call it “highlights” but they were definitely not all highlights. So, let’s start with all the stupid health things that happened this year. It’s no wonder it feels so hard to be alive with all this shit going on.

My knees are so jacked up with arthritis and a lack of cartilage that I have to stop dancing or doing anything strenuous on my knees, as discussed above. I also had my first MRI in the process of evaluating what exactly was wrong.
I wondered why it was getting so hard to breathe for me earlier this year and found out that I have had severe acid reflux! Thankfully this one is easily treated with medication. It is wild to just be living with things wrong with me for years and assuming that’s how it feels to live.
In October, we took care of my dogs-in-law for a few weeks. This led to my first migraine with aura and a trip to the ER (they said I was fine). The migraines have not returned so we must conclude that they were dog-induced.
My doctor informed me that my blood sugar was in the pre-diabetic range but I made some adjustments and now I’m not pre-diabetic. At least I have that going for me.
I got braces in June and fortunately my teeth cooperated so I got them off again right before Christmas. Now I have to wear a retainer full time for the next two months before I can switch to just wearing it at night.

With that out of the way, here are some actual highlights of 2025:

I wrote a lot! According to WordPress statistics, I’ve written just under 81,000 words (not including this post). Some of my best pieces include this month’s essay about the experience of being expelled from Brigham Young University 20 years ago and my thoughts about the shit show that is our current government, not the least of which were the completely false pronouncement that Tylenol causes autism (did we ever get a lawsuit for that by the way?), witnessing the live-streamed genocide in Gaza, and the discussion of AI as the aesthetic of fascism.
I also wrote some good guides: finding books to read, assembling an emergency kit, what to do now that social media is dying.
I made voter guides in English and Spanish for the special election.
I translated a whole bunch of Wikipedia pages. In Icelandic, I finished translating articles in the Skagafjörður category, and for Spanish we’ve been doing a little bit of everything, as usual.
I performed in two dance recitals.
I finished knitting a tiny shawl, carpal tunnel be damned.
I hosted potlucks with my friends celebrating soup, tea party foods, the “three sisters” (corn, beans and squash), and holiday cookies.
I made plans to go to Vienna for Eurovision next year with my friends and started learning German to facilitate that, then cancelled the plans because the Eurovision member countries are doubling down on their support for Israel.
I switched to Linux!
I Started volunteering at the Lavender Library in February and was the volunteer of the month in September for my work on updating (or in some cases, creating) documentation.
I was a patron of the arts and went to see the Sacramento Ballet, monster jam (is this art?), Disney on Ice, a show at B Street Theater, and comedian Maria Bamford.
In house drama, our new shower was finally finished and we got a new stove and microwave.
I downloaded all my ebooks and fully extricated myself from the Amazon/Kindle system.
I read Don fucking Quijote in Spanish!

Kitchen Witchery

Here are some of my favorite foods I made this year. Looks like a lot of pumpkin and galettes, based on the photos. I’d also like to note that I got the snow cone maker attachment for the Kitchen Aid mixer, so it was snow cone central here last summer.

A plate of tofu, green beans, and peanuts coated in a thick glaze over fried rice — Kung pao tofu and fried rice

cross section shot of caramel bars with candied peanuts showing a shortbread base, a thick layer of caramel topped with caramelized peanuts, and covered with chocolate — Kung pao tofu and fried rice

Cat Therapy

Here are some of my favorite cat photos from the last year for your nerves.

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

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

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: December 28, 2025

Posted on December 28, 2025 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. I hope everyone had a wonderful Fritzmas (for those who observe). Things were fairly chill here, but I fear my four-day weekend has passed by far too quickly. I can’t already be on day four. It’s criminal. Everyone should have the last two weeks of December off.

I’ve been doing a bad job of getting my cards out, so please enjoy this year’s Fritzmas card. I’m still working on getting these in the mail. I like hand-writing messages for everyone, but the carpal tunnel makes it hard to sit down and write a bunch of messages, so it’s slow going.

an illustration of my cat Fritz, front paws crossed and winking at the viewer. He is wearing a santa hat and the background is blue with snowflakes — Merry Fritzmas, art by https://www.odnatamyara.com/

We’re playing chess now

My friend Lacy decided that we were going to get good at chess since she’s stuck in bed most of the time with long covid and I can’t use my knees anymore. Neither of us are particularly good but that is okay, we are learning. We started using the chess.com app, which is quite nice. It has lessons and puzzles built in, in addition to just playing games with people online. This sounds like a commercial and it kind of is because I think you (yes, you) should play chess with us online. My username is Linzmatic (and that orange cat doing a karate kick that you see below is my profile picture lol)!

image from Mean Girls of the "get in loser, we're going shopping" meme edited with pictures of mine and Lacey's avatars over Regina and Gretchen and the caption "get in loser, we're going to become chess masters" — Let us appreciate the humble image edit in this age of AI image creation

Books and Other Words

book cover for The Black Bird Oracle shown on kobo ereader — The Black Bird Oracle

The Black Bird Oracle is the fifth book in Deborah Harkness’s All Souls series. I liked this one a lot more than the last book, probably because it brought focus back to the series’ main character: Diana Bishop. In this installment, Diana is magically contacted by her father’s side of the family, the Proctors, which she has never been in touch with. She is called upon to get in touch with another aspect of her magic, plus she’s raising her magical kids, navigating magic politics, and dealing with her overprotective vampire husband. Now I’m caught up with the series and must wait for the next book to publish.

Meanwhile, on the internet:

Making Sense of The Nutcracker’s Libretto via JSTOR Daily. I found this article interesting but I’m mostly sharing it for this bit: “The Sugar Plum Fairy intentionally fostered the representation of an idealized female ruler, conflating traditional representations of the absolutist monarch as a force for good and of the female sovereign as an agent of civilization.” Thank you, benevolent lady dictator of the Land of Sweets.
Flock Exposed Its AI-Powered Cameras to the Internet. We Tracked Ourselves via 404 Media. It is extremely concerning that the cameras cities are using to allegedly track license plates are “designed to record and track people, not vehicles.” From the article, “Condor cameras can be set to automatically zoom in on people’s faces as they walk through a parking lot, down a public street, or play on a playground, or they can be controlled manually, according to marketing material on Flock’s website.” There is no use for this other than surveilling the population.
Watch the 60 Minutes Segment CBS Didn’t Want You to See via The Present Age. Bari Weiss, now editor-in-chief of CBS news, killed a segment about CECOT (the mega prison in El Salvador where the US has been sending people) that was set to air on 60 Minutes this week. The segment did, however, air in Canada thanks to the way TV distribution works. The takeaway? “Now we know what Bari Weiss considers unacceptably critical of the Trump administration.”

Computer World

My long-time internet browser of choice, Mozilla Firefox, has announced it is going to be “investing in AI” and building AI into every aspect of the software. First of all: yuck. Second: why does my browser need AI? The browser’s job is to show me internet websites. That’s it. That is not an “AI” activity. Mozilla is stating that they plan to make the AI features secure, which I’m not convinced is possible. I also hate what this current strain of general “AI” tools is doing to the web and the environment and I want no part of it.

I am trying out a new browser called Waterfox, which is based on the code for Firefox but is not incorporating AI features. In their press release in response to Firefox’s AI ambitions, they state “Waterfox will not include LLMs. Full stop. At least and most definitely not in their current form or for the foreseeable future.” So far, it’s working fairly well for me. The only things that haven’t worked right are Teams (but that might be that I hadn’t set up all my permissions yet) and drag-and-dropping images to upload them to my blog (it wasn’t working yesterday but it worked today. A mystery!). Still, it seems like a good browser and I’m planning to keep using it. Companies aren’t going to stop doing AI garbage until they realize they are going to lose money when they do it.

Like Riding a Bike

Given that my knees are irreparably busted and I am limited to low-impact activities, I asked Kirk to get me a new unicycle for Christmas. I still have my lovely Miyata unicycle, but she’s more of an indoor girl for doing tricks and things, and I want to cruise around outside. I got the Impact Athmos because it seemed like it would be good for outside and should be able to support my size.

On Friday, I assembled the thing and took to the outdoors! I was immediately disappointed because I thought I was going to get up and unsteadily get going but that was not the case. I walked to the local park to find a wall for support and was able to ride a very little. Then I realized I had done a bad job screwing on the fork, so I went home to tighten that up and tried again on Saturday. I was met with much greater success! I still used the wall to mount and get situated, but then I rode for about 50 feet before stopping because I was exhausted from the effort. I did that more than once before realizing I had screwed on my left pedal badly and it was at a fucked up angle, so I retired for the day. I am hoping to try again today and not have any mechanical incidents! Maybe now that everything is properly screwed in, I’ll be able to ride a little better.

This has been a blow to the ego for sure because I have been telling myself that I still got it even after about 15 years of not unicycling regularly, and yet I have discovered I don’t really got it at all. Despite all that, I was surprised at how good it felt to be riding, even a little. So maybe this really will be my low-impact exercise solution.

Anyway, a little unicycling inspo:

me, on a unicycle, juggling knives in a roller rink — juggling knives on a unicycle

Me riding an 8-foot tall unicycle that has a frame shaped like a Z — juggling knives on a unicycle

Kitchen Witchery

I really agonized over what to make on Christmas Eve because it seems I still haven’t established any particular tradition I want to stick with. We might have a contender now because the baked brie and caramelized vegetable pie was very good and Kirk and I both loved it. I served it with French garlic chicken. That recipe is for the instant pot but I used chicken breast so I just cooked it on the stove and it came out fine. We had black-bottom oatmeal pie for dessert (a chocolate ganache with a caramelly oat mixture on top). I don’t think that’s inherently a Christmas recipe, I just wanted to try it. Also pictured below is a potato, leek, and turkey soup. I used the potato and leek soup recipe from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian but added some of my leftover turkey and stock from the freezer to make it a little heartier.

a bowl of soup featuring pieces of potato and turkey, topped with chives — potato, leek, and turkey soup

big-ass and beautifully glossy puff pastry bake on a baking sheet — potato, leek, and turkey soup

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat sleeping on top of the couch in a pose that suggests true weariness — sleepiest man alive

Fritz the cat sleeping in a ball. His tail is wrapped around him and his front paw is on top of the tail — sleepiest man alive

personal essay

Twenty Years Since I Was Expelled from Brigham Young University

Posted on December 17, 2025 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello friends and enemies. Happy anniversary to a bizarre life milestone! On December 17, 2005, I was expelled from Brigham Young University, which means today we are observing the twenty-year anniversary of me being kicked out of school. I was 19 and I thought my life was over.

When people ask me where I went to college, I usually say I graduated from the University of Washington. This is true but it obscures the full story. It’s all the answer that most need, to be honest, and I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea about my current belief system. Most people I meet now are shocked that I was ever Mormon. Though, to be honest, many people I knew growing up were shocked that I was Mormon too; they all thought I was too smart for that shit and they were right, just a little early.

I started college in fall 2004 at BYU and, at the time, I was a true believer in the Mormon church, officially known as The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, as their PR team wants you to call it but everyone I knew within the church thought of themselves as Mormon. I spent most of my childhood in Mormonism; after my parents divorced when I was seven years old, my dad started taking us to the church he had grown up in but had left as an adult. I did all the Mormon stuff you’re supposed to do as a young person like go to early morning seminary throughout high school; it’s a Bible (and Book of Mormon) study class that, in my town, started at 6:10 a.m. because high school started at 7:30. I woke up at 5 a.m. every day to go do church shit and, frankly, that sucked. I was very tired all throughout school for a variety of reasons but this was definitely a big one.

In high school, I was sure I wanted to be an Egyptologist (I changed my mind but that’s okay). So when I applied to college, I wanted to go somewhere I could study ancient Egypt and learn Arabic, since that’s what they speak in Egypt today. I got accepted to BYU and UC Berkeley, and both had programs I wanted to attend. Turning down Berkeley is still a notable regrets, which I guess isn’t too serious of a regret all things considered, but I think I would have had a much better time. Then again, it might have taken me a lot longer to figure out that Mormonism was not right for me if I hadn’t been immersed in such a staunchly Mormon environment. We’ll never know for sure, but I think seeing Mormonism applied to such an extreme level had a chilling effect on my relationship with the religion.

Brigham Young University was and is very strict about its vision of how Mormon youth ought to be living. All students are required to follow its honor code and there is a whole office dedicated to its enforcement. This isn’t just the standard “don’t plagiarize;” BYU’s honor code requires that students “abstain from same-sex romantic behavior” and it includes strict rules about dressing “modestly”—everyone has to cover their shoulders, women can only have one ear piercing and men aren’t allowed to have beards unless they get an exception (colloquially known as a “beard card”). It’s ironic when you consider that Mormon religious art always depicts Jesus with a beard (Jesus also had 12 dudes following him around at all times but apparently he was abstaining from “same-sex romantic behavior”). It’s cool if god does it but I guess not anyone else.

They do really enforce the honor code at BYU. My first encounter with it was right after I moved into the dorms. I went to eat at the cafeteria and was told to leave and change into shorts that went all the way to my knees if I wanted to be served. For the record, I was not wearing booty shorts, the shorts landed a few inches above my knees, but they were not going to let me eat until I did something about it! They also have a “testing center” on campus where students can take exams. They won’t let you in if you’re not dressed and groomed appropriately. I remember seeing a bearded guy get turned away once when it turned out he didn’t have a beard card. Insane that wearing a tank top or something can prevent you from being able to take an exam that affects your grades, but that’s a choice BYU made and a policy that all their students technically agree to.

The transition to college was difficult for me. I felt like I had time making friends when I started school, although in retrospect I think a lot of people felt they were friends with me and I simply had no idea. I just thought I was a weird outsider all the time but I now understand a lot of that feeling comes from autism. I think the rest came from the alienation of living in a deeply authoritarian environment during an age when I was supposed to be figuring out who I was and who I wanted to be and who I might want to romantically entangle myself with. It seemed like everyone was pairing off and getting married immediately (according to this article from the BYU student paper, a quarter of BYU students were married in 2021), including one of my good friends from high school who got married as a sophomore. I felt I was cool and likeable but this didn’t translate into romantic encounters so I kind of felt like I was being left out of something. I made friends with a few girls in the dorm and I made a couple of friends by showing up at the juggling club, but otherwise, I was struggling. One time I tried to get a date by hanging out around the cafeteria and juggling. I made a little sign to say I was looking for a partner for some dance event. There’s probably a better way to get attention but I was using what I knew! Many dudes stopped to tell me I was being intimidating and that guys do not want to go out with a girl carrying knives (their loss). I did eventually get a date for the evening, so my methods worked.

Me, 18 years old, perching in a doorway with my back pressed to one side and my feet to the other. Another girl is trying to copy my technique with limited success. — Showing the gals in the dorm how to perch in a doorway

Me, dressed nicely and juggling knives outside the cafeteria at BYU. I have converted a pizza box into a sign that says I'm looking for someone to go to a salsa dance event with — Showing the gals in the dorm how to perch in a doorway

By my second semester, I was losing the will to participate in Mormonism, which means BYU beat the religious inclination out of me in mere months. Everything seemed hypocritical and fake. I can’t remember exactly how and when I arrived at the decision to start skipping church on Sundays, but I distinctly remember my dorm neighbor asking me on Easter if she could borrow a skirt. I told her it was fine especially since I wasn’t going to attend. She was scandalized that I wouldn’t be attending church on Easter of all days, but a guy I had been hanging out with and crushing on for most of the year had revealed the night before that he actually had a girlfriend back home (that he had never mentioned before). So, you know, I felt like shit. Jesus is risen every year. It’s fine.

The summer after my freshman year, I tried going to church at home now and again, but whatever I thought I had been getting from it before was gone. My dad and sister had already stopped going (and, of course, my mom had never been Mormon). I thought that I should keep trying but it wasn’t working for me and I had no idea what would make it work. It seemed like everyone at church felt sorry for me since my family wasn’t attending and my dad and step-mom had recently divorced (and my ex-step-mom had been talking shit about us at church) and I had very few friends in town so I was not having fun.

When I returned to school for my sophomore year, I was generally following the rules and the honor code, but I didn’t want to go to church anymore. I told myself I wasn’t sure how I felt about it all and I just needed some time to think. I spent a lot of time that semester feeling miserable and hiding in my tiny bedroom in my off-campus apartment. School felt difficult for the first time and it felt like I was going through the motions in everything. Of course I can now see this as a depressive episode but I didn’t realize then and, in fact, the only person who did was my friend Kael. He would call me now and again that semester to check on me. He told me later he was worried about me because I was so clearly depressed. He remains the only friend from my time at BYU and I will appreciate him forever. Everyone else stopped talking to me after I stopped being Mormon and began posting angrily about Mormonism and everything else on Facebook (please recall that this was 2005 and we were all on Facebook).

Part of BYU’s honor code stipulates that you have to attend church regularly, I believe the rules then (and perhaps now still) required you to make it to church 80 percent of the time, and yes, someone at church is in charge of tracking attendance. In telling this tale over the years, some people have asked me “What about non-Mormons? Do they have to go to church?” There are non-Mormons who go to BYU (my friend Kael, for example) and they are required to attend whatever services are appropriate to their religious beliefs, just as Mormons have to attend Mormon church, which is weirdly held on campus in various lecture halls. When I stopped showing up at church, I was technically breaking the rules. At first, no one really noticed but then I accidentally called attention to myself.

That semester, I was looking for a job and since no one in my life warned me about multi-level marketing (MLM) scams, I ended up an “independent contractor” for Vector Marketing. That is, I was selling Cutco knives. I was amused by the gig at first because I was like, well, I actually juggle knives so it will be funny if I sell them (it was not funny). If you know about MLMs, then you already know that they rely on you selling to everyone you know and I mostly knew poor college students who did not want or need to spend hundreds of dollars on a set of kitchen knives. I was desperately trying to figure out who I could put on my little song and dance for, so I turned to my congregation’s directory and bravely cold called the wives of my ward’s bishop and first counselors (Mormon church is divided into “wards”, which are congregations governed by a bishop who is aided by two counselors and these people are always men). They generously agreed to hear my sales pitch. I guess I didn’t think my plan all the way through because during one of my meetings, the woman’s husband, that is, my ward’s bishop, showed up and realized he had never seen me before, which led to some uncomfortable questions about what the heck I was doing and why I had not been at church. Whoops.

Shortly afterwards, I got a call from the bishop asking me to meet with him in a more official capacity. I barely remember this meeting but the gist was that I had to go to church or they would have to kick me out of school. I remember telling him it felt hypocritical to go to church when I was confused about my beliefs. This was apparently an unsatisfactory answer. I also brought up the fact that there are plenty of people who drink and party on Saturday night (also an honor code violation) who roll into church on Sunday as if they weren’t hung over. I suggested it was much worse to hypocritically attend church after breaking the rules than to not break any rules and simply not attend church while thinking about things. This was the wrong answer. People love it when you keep up appearances and hate when you point out contradictions (autism strikes again).

I was then contacted by office of the next person up the Mormon hierarchy, the stake president (groups of wards are organized into “stakes” overseen by the stake president). I remember a lot more of this encounter because it was contentious and I felt convinced of my rightness (classic 19-year-old behavior, but you know what I was actually right). The stake president lectured me for a long time about how I was being terrible and he told me that going to BYU is a dream opportunity for so many, but I was squandering it. I specifically remember him telling me that I was taking up space for someone who deserved to be there. I paraphrased a well-known piece of Mormon lore at him, “whom the lord calls, the lord qualifies.” If god wanted someone to attend BYU, they would be there, regardless of what I was doing. Did you know that old dudes in power super hate it when young women disagree with them and they do it with citations? Well, I learned on that day (I re-learn this lesson often, I fear). By the time the meeting ended, I knew my academic career at BYU was over.

I went back to my apartment after I told my roommate that this is probably how it feels to be on drugs. I was laughing and crying. I was freaking out. The stake president told me I would be asked to leave BYU until I sort myself out. I was sure my life was over. I had worked so hard in high school—taking AP classes, getting good grades, going to church all the fucking time, doing activities—because I knew college was the way out of my town and my family drama and now it was all falling apart. I had always assumed I would go to college and get a job and I thought my life was going to be ruined forever (spoiler: it wasn’t. I don’t want anyone to worry). I had no idea what happened to people when they got kicked out of college. I had never heard of such a thing. I felt like I had done everything right only to do something so incredibly wrong.

Letter on BYU letterhead from the Honor Code Office informing me that my "ecclesiastical endorsement has been withdrawn" and that I am no longer permitted to attend class, register for classes, or graduate as of 12/17/2005 — Official letter asking me to leave BYU that I have kept all this time

I was technically not “expelled” from school in a traditional sense, but I knew I wouldn’t be going home and getting right with the lord just to return to a place that was making me miserable, even if I hadn’t yet fully articulated what was making me unhappy. BYU sent me a formal letter informing me that they had revoked my “ecclesiastical endorsement,” which meant I had lost the rights to attend class or graduate from BYU and even to live in my apartment because it was “BYU-approved housing” until I got my local bishop to say I was in good standing with the church and endorse me again. I finished my semester unhappy and angry with everything, not to mention fucking cold because a year and a half of school later and I still had no idea how to dress for Utah winter. My roommate Devon—who was not Mormon at the time but later converted to marry some man—and I spent the time dreaming up funny pranks that might actually be worth being expelled over, like distributing condoms all over campus.

I left school and moved back in with my dad. Of course, I did manage to graduate college a few years later, and I moved out of my hometown again too. I had a rough year dealing with the dissonance between what I expected my college experience to be and how things happened in reality, but that is a tale for another day.

It seemed then, and honestly still seems to me now, so silly to be kicked out of school over not showing up to church for a few months. I wasn’t doing anything really bad. I didn’t drink or have pre-marital sex, act on any “same-sex attraction,” or try “soaking” (I am still not sure this is a real thing but perhaps the mormon youth are that desperate to bone down). I just wanted time to think about what I believed in and what kind of life would feel right to me, and within a single semester I lost something I had worked so hard for. I thought I was going to be able to graduate college in just three years because I had come in with so much credit from taking AP classes in high school. Although I’m not sure it would have ultimately worked out, I was really upset about it for a long time. I might have graduated before the 2008 recession and gotten a job before that kind of thing was impossible for recent graduates! Again, we can’t know all the alternate universe versions of ourselves. I’m ultimately grateful to not have Brigham Young University haunting my resume for the rest of my life.

I am sharing this today because every year I think about this strange anniversary. I thought people might be interested in this whole story. People are shocked whenever I bring it up but it’s something that’s hard to explain in brief. It’s been twenty years since I thought my life would be ruined by being kicked out of college. In hindsight, I’m proud to have been expelled from Brigham Young University. How many people can add that to their resume?

weekly update

Two Weeks in the Life: December 15, 2025

Posted on December 15, 2025 by Lindsey Halsell

Hello, friends and enemies. The news this week is that my Eurovision plans are officially canceled. I was really excited to go for my 40th birthday, but the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) is doubling down on its support for Israel, and I don’t feel I can go in good conscience. Last week, the EBU had a meeting with broadcasters from all the countries that participate in Eurovision. There had been talk of letting members vote whether Israel should participate next year, but I think that Israel claiming that they’re having a “cease fire” (which it has violated over 500 times and during which Israel has destroyed over 1,500 buildings) gave the broadcasters cover to keep on ignoring the atrocities. So far, only five countries have said they will boycott the competition while Israel is allowed to stay: Spain, Ireland, Slovenia, the Netherlands, and Iceland. The director of the Eurovision Song Contest has boldly come out saying that it “shouldn’t be used as a political theatre,” which is nuts considering the entire damn point of Eurovision was to get European countries to like each other again after World War II. It sucks to have something I like so much ruined like this.

All that said: what should I do for my 40th birthday? The Eurovision trip was exciting for the Eurovision itself of course but also because I had given myself the challenge of learning as much German as possible before going to Vienna. I stopped working on the language when it started to look like they were going to allow Israel to compete as usual. I wasn’t super obsessed with learning German and wanted to keep spending my time on Spanish and Icelandic. I like when I can do something that combines multiple interests and I like going to places after having a chance to read up on them. I don’t love going places with no context, as I learned when I was 14 and we lived in England for a year and my (now ex-)step-mom dragged us to every historical and cultural site on the island. I am being encouraged to find an alternative 40th birthday activity but I’ve had this in mind for so long that I’m drawing a complete blank. Any suggestions from the commentariat?

Books and Other Words

Paperback book: Time's Convert by Deborah Harkness — Time’s Convert

Time’s Convert is the fourth book in Deborah Harkness’s All Souls series and the first to feature different main characters. While the first three books were exclusively about the relationship between Diana Bishop and Matthew de Clermont, Time’s Convert focuses on Matthew’s vampire son, Marcus, and his girlfriend Phoebe who has decided to become a vampire herself (good for her). The story bounces between the perspectives of Marcus coming of age and becoming a vampire during the American revolutionary war and, in the present, Phoebe becoming a vampire and the happenings of the Bishop-de Clermont household. I found this book a bit harder to get interested in than the previous ones, perhaps because I am simply not interested in the American revolutionary period or perhaps because there was too much movement between different story lines. It was still an enjoyable read overall, just not as intense as the previous books. I’m onto the next book already and I’m liking it better so far.

book cover for Don Quijote shown on Kobo ereader. Fritz the cat is snoozing on my lap — Don Quijote de la Mancha feat. Fritz

I finally finished reading Don Quijote! I started in January (see this post) and it took me the whole fucking year! Although I didn’t exactly read it every day and my ereader reports that I spent 67 hours total reading, which is a lot of time to be sure but not “takes a whole year” numbers. It was definitely a good learning exercise and, if nothing else, I have improved my stamina for reading in Spanish. I think I would have been better served by reading a chapter summary in English or even reading the English translation before each chapter in Spanish, just because there’s a lot of archaic weirdness and it was hard to keep up, despite the literal thousands of footnotes scattered through the book for the modern Spanish reader. It’s not unlike English speakers reading Shakespeare with no preparation (although Shakespeare’s plays are short).

As for the actual content of the story, I did like it. I found a lot of humor in it (and I believe there is even more humor there that I did not find lol). I mean, it’s inherently funny for Sancho to go on and on about how he would like to be rewarded for his service with an island only to be made a governor later on and fucking hate it (plus he’s illiterate, which is not ideal for government functionaries). I particularly enjoyed some of the bizarre characters who showed up and there’s even an appearance from the wizard Merlin in which he drops some sick rhymes. What a cool guy. Something else I was amused by is that Don Quijote (ne Alonso Quijano) goes nuts after reading too many novels about knights, and there’s a scene where a local priest and Don Q’s housekeeper are trying to get rid of all these books that drove him mad. It just goes to show that people will be pissed off about any medium at all. If it’s not the kids and their damn phones its the landed gentry and their chivalric fiction. I also think there’s an element of what we would now understand as fan fiction in this tale. Cervantes is very well versed in this genre and then decides to make up his own guy to send him on adventures in this universe, which feels very fan fiction to me. Is that all fiction? Is that just being alive? I don’t even know anymore but I think there’s an argument to be made. Maybe I’ll get a master’s in Spanish and write a thesis about it (please don’t let me do that).

Meanwhile, on the internet:

The Company Betting You’ll Bet on Anything via The Present Age. Betting on everything seems to be taking over the US, or at least the US internet—if you’ve seen any “news” posts from Polymarket, you are getting news from a betting company. One of the new “trading” (read: gambling via your phone) companies, Kalshi, has a CEO who wants to turn “any difference of opinion” into something you can bet on. Bleak! They’re marketing themselves as a “new asset class” rather than gambling and trying to get college students hooked. Seems bad. I also think this fits with something Ryan Broderick of Garbage Day has been observing for a while: our whole economy is turning into a casino.
Scientists Are Increasingly Worried AI Will Sway Elections via 404 Media. I’m sure nothing bad can come of that.
Dr. Oz Tells His Federal Employees to Eat Less via Wired. Dr. Oz can fuck right off. No one wants their boss to comment on what they’re eating. Get a life.
The Anti-Cosmetic Surgery Essay Every Woman Should Read via Father Karine. Just as the title says, you should read it.

Media

I was already planning to write bit about how I have started getting DVDs from the library instead of paying for every streaming service at once, and then I saw 404 Media published The Last Video Rental Store Is Your Public Library, to which I say: hell yeah. Kirk and I recently decided to get caught up on Doctor Who and of course it’s somehow not on any streaming service that we already pay for. Then I remembered that the library has DVDs that you can borrow for free. I could have been doing this all along! It’s not surprising that more and more people are remembering that they can get their shows at the library now that streaming services are fragmented and prices are going up. When Netflix was new, it really seemed like we would be able to get any show or movie at any time forever so it was unnecessary to have DVDs or your own collection. Well, that clearly turned out to be a lie. Stop spending money on streaming services! Get ye to the local library!

Computer World

I recently discovered that Linux (at least Linux Mint) doesn’t allow you to right-click and edit properties for music files like Windows does, which had me searching online for how to do that! After the Great MP3 Reorganization, I am unwilling to let my music collection fall back into disarray. I found a program called EasyTag (also available on Windows lol) that is for exactly this kind of stuff. It is, indeed, easy to use. I was very glad to get it set up because the new Rosalía album had the artist tagged as “ROSALÍA” instead of “Rosalía,” which are two completely unrelated entities as far as the computer is concerned. I’ve set it all to rights now. By the way, the album is really fucking good.

Rampant Consumerism

Kirk and I had been talking for a little while about switching to an induction stove, both because it’s probably environmentally better and to get us away from the local gas company, PG&E (fuck PG&E). Our microwave broke on Thanksgiving, just before it’s most important week of the year (Thanksgiving leftover season is peak microwave time) and we quickly realized that a microwave is very important to how we operate. So, we went out and bought both new appliances. They are very nice! I wasn’t sure how I would feel about the induction stove but it heats things up so quickly and evenly. I love it! I’ve been putting the oven through thorough testing by making a ton of holiday treats over the last week and I feel like it’s doing a good job. I think our old one ran a little cold, so it’s nice to have one that works correctly. I was alarmed to learn that you apparently have to “burn in” a new oven, so consider this a public service announcement. I turned on the oven and freaked out when I smelled burning and thought there was some kind of plastic trapped in there. No. Apparently that’s just a thing that no one should worry about.

By the way, if you’re in Sacramento and looking to switch from gas to induction, SMUD has a good rebate available.

my stove and microwave, which are both very shiny. My reflection is visible in the microwave and I'm giving a thumbs up — new microwave and induction stove!

Doing Stuff

I had a super busy weekend doing holiday stuff. We went to see Sac Ballet do The Nutcracker, which I enjoy more now that I know more about ballet and about what the hell is happening in the story. It’s not always very easy to figure out what is going on in these ballets if you’re not already familiar. I think my favorites are the peppermint dancers, they just look fun. I also thought the dancers playing the gnome and Mother Ginger were very fun to watch; they hammed it up well and Mother Ginger was low-key vogueing the house down.

On Sunday, Lemon and I hosted a holiday cookie party and invited our friends to show up with cookies to swap. Honestly, hanging out with your homies and eating a ton of cookies is peak human activity; it doesn’t get much better! I highly recommend it. Here’s the cookie spread!

A table covered in various types of holiday cookies — cookie party spread

Languages

One of the fun parts about translating Wikipedia articles is filling in the network of articles that connect to a topic. I had been translating some articles into Spanish about songs from this year’s Eurovision, which included the Miriana Conte song “Serving” aka “Serving Kant.” This really necessitated explaining the concept of “serving cunt” in Spanish as well because otherwise the controversy about the song title doesn’t mean much. I also translated the article on the Arabian riff (you’ll know it when you hear it! There’s an audio player on the Wikipedia page). That was cool because I didn’t even realize that tune had a name or a history beyond the schoolyard rhyme of “there’s a place in France/where the naked ladies dance.”

I’m doing similar things in Icelandic (not thematically similar; I’m not ready to explain serving cunt in Icelandic) and I recently translated the article on kúgildi, which was a unit of value that means “cow value,” into English. I’m very proud of my work on the article on Garðskagaviti, a lighthouse in southern Iceland and a favorite of my lighthouse-loving friend Abby. This article is not a translation! The Icelandic article was light on information so I read some articles (mostly in Icelandic) about the lighthouse and wrote this Wikipedia page, then translated it into Icelandic to review with my teacher. I haven’t updated Icelandic Wikipedia yet, so if you go looking for that version, you’ll need to wait a few days.

Moving It

Last call for my next dance (and perhaps final) recital! It is on Saturday, December 20. If you want to go, you can get a ticket here: https://www.etix.com/ticket/o/10638/galaxydancearts

Kitchen Witchery

I have been making a lot of holiday treats and the majority are pictured here. We got:

Sugar cookies with Christmas M&Ms.
Gingersnaps (I roll them in vanilla sugar for a little extra excitement).
Chessboard cookies (from the Nordic Baking Book).
Dulce de leche fudge (I also made walnut fudge but forgot to take a picture. You can imagine it, I’m sure).
Toffee! In high demand among my family members.
Candied nuts, a new addition this year. I used the Smitten Kitchen recipe.
The diva, my million peso shortbread.

a sheet pan of sugar cookies with red and green M&Ms mixed in — sugar cookies with M&Ms

a batch of gingersnap cookies arranged on a wire rack — sugar cookies with M&Ms

It might look like I’ve been subsisting entirely on treats, but here is some actual food to prove otherwise. After thanksgiving, I immediately put my leftover turkey to use in turkey, farro, and chickpea soup and then a pot pie (I use a recipe from The Harvest Baker). I used the rest of the chickpeas I made for the soup in tahini loaded sweet potatoes, which we like a lot. Finally, I made a bean and bacon soup.

A big pot of soup with chickpeas, farro, shredded turkey, and chunks of carrot — turkey, farro, and chickpea soup

a bowl of biscuit-topped turkey pot pie — turkey, farro, and chickpea soup

Cat Therapy

Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.

Fritz the cat looking crazed and hanging onto the corner of the bed — !!!

Fritz the cat in a pair of pants. The waistline is over his head not unlike a hijab — !!!