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.
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:
Books and Other Words
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.
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.
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
