Hello, friends and enemies. It’s October! It’s fall! It’s 100 fucking degrees outside! At the time of this writing (Saturday afternoon), we are having our carpets cleaned, which means the front door is partially open for the series of tubes involved in shampooing the carpets and the heat is getting in. We also couldn’t find Fritz for a while and I was freaking out thinking he got outside. Fortunately, this guy’s instinct is not to run outside, it’s to wedge himself into a corner between the couch and the wall, then shimmy underneath the couch when someone tries to extract him. So, my house is hot, my carpet is clean, my cat is a little freak. Let’s go!
Current Events
I am still out here talking about problems with Flock and Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs)! I was on the news twice in the last two weeks: in this longer piece on CBS 13 Sacramento and in another from Spectrum News. I didn’t get a ton of air time in the CBS piece but I did find it funny that one part cut straight from me to the CEO of Flock. The Spectrum piece was very favorable and included some good bits. Who knows where I’ll pop up next!
There is some alarming surveillance stuff in the news recently and I think it really highlights why opposing ALPRs, and mass surveillance more broadly, is so important. 404 Media reported on a program called High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area (HIDTA), which the federal government is using “to obtain data from local cops’ Flock, Axon, and other ALPR cameras and aggregate it on federal government servers, where it is then accessible to other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.” It’s illegal to share ALPR data gathered in California with federal agencies (SB 34, 2016), so whatever is going on here is, at the very least, violating that law. The DeFlock Elk Grove Community Audit data do indicate that our data appeared in some searches by the HIDTA program. As usual, we have many unanswered questions about where all this information ends up and what it is being used for. Still, I can’t imagine they’re doing anything nice with it.
For another insane use of ALPRs: It was recently reported that the Pentagon has Flock cameras in their parking lot, which means a private corporation could know a whole lot about what is happening in the government. I would argue that Flock shouldn’t have access to that information and I would like to know what kind of benefit the Pentagon thinks it’s getting from this. Meanwhile, the US Postal Service is “running a pilot program to put cameras in its mail carrier trucks that continuously scan roads and signs, map roadways and sidewalks” in partnership with a company called Next Base. Similarly, Amazon is about to launch a program in which drivers will wear “smart delivery glasses,” and they “expect to have more than 20,000 of its AI-powered Smart Delivery Glasses in the field by the end of 2027.” The cameras on the glasses “can capture thousands of images during a shift,” which will be fed into Amazon’s AI and presumably catch a bunch of people answering the door in their pajamas to grab a package. Not to mention they could pick up information about anything else the driver is looking at while on the job. Given the amount of ground Amazon delivery drivers cover in the aggregate, this is a surveillance nightmare. If you haven’t already stopped using Amazon, this is a great time to quit (it’s not really possible to opt out of the postal service, however). I do not want to support a company that is forcing their workers to act as roving surveillance cameras and that has no way for consumers to opt out of (I almost said no way for “customers” to opt out, but it’s clear that whoever pays for the product all this data is feeding in to is the actual customer, not people ordering shit from the Amazon storefront). If you’re looking for alternatives to Amazon and other mega-corporations, I recommend checking out the resources on Cut Off the Spigot.
We also saw some recent attempted legislation related to surveillance. This week, Governor Gavin Newsom “vetoed a bill that would have prohibited people from secretly record others using smart glasses in certain spaces” like changing rooms and doctors’ offices. The bill also “would have forced manufacturers … to include an indicator that’s on when the devices are recording.” Glad to know Newsom is fine with people wearing the pervert glasses anywhere (sarcasm! I hate Gavin Newsom and will keep hating him in public when he inevitably announces his presidential run). However, in better news, in Congress, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez proposed a bill that would “bar federal agencies from using automated license plate readers or accessing data from the technology and prevent federal grants from funding states and local governments that use automated license plate readers.” I do not at all expect this to pass because clearly everyone is making a lot of fucking money from this technology and I am sure they can afford to throw a little cash at their pet legislators. Still, it’s nice to see this is getting some attention at the national level and I hope we make some progress!
Books and Other Words
I hope no one thinks less of me for this, but I am getting a little tired of Dungeon Crawler Carl. You might say, then take a break! Normally I would agree with you but I waited a long time on the library hold list and then I got the last three books in quick succession. Last week I finished book seven, This Inevitable Ruin. This was a particularly intense installment focusing on the long-awaited “faction wars” portion of the dungeon, in which real people can pay to enter the dungeon and play the game in what amounts to hunting people for sport, since the crawlers can really die but the visitors normally cannot. However, Carl and Princess Donut, whose fan club raised enough money for them to compete as a real faction instead of just being prey for rich people, got a rule instated that everyone can die for real, which pissed off a lot of rich aliens. The ending of this one irritated me somewhat (spoilers ahead). One of the main women characters, Katya, at the end of this book gets the option of skipping a few dungeon levels to attend to a “god” or getting magically pregnant and leaving the dungeon. She picks pregnancy. It does make sense based on her character’s backstory, and she clearly has wanted a child for a long time, but I found it aggravating that one of the only women in the story (unless you count Princess Donut, who is female but is a cat and more of a child than a woman) gets yoinked out on a baby-based technicality. And Katya’s character in the dungeon was very bad-ass! Matt Dinniman is removing a bad-ass woman from the game so she can have a baby! Anyway this kind of shit is why I’m tired of male authors and will be declaring a moratorium on books by men [except for Proust] for at least the rest of the year (surely reading eight Dungeon Crawler Carl books warrants this).
Meanwhile, on the internet:
- ‘Literally state-run TV’: Trump launches YouTube channel amid boycott by US networks via The Guardian. The “Trump TV” thing is truly one of the most pathetic things to come out of this administration. It’s just a YouTube channel playing Trump’s greatest hits. Comments are disabled and the view count is very low. It’s safe to ignore it.
- how do you solve a problem like the paywall? via Boxed Whine. From the article “Audiences and newsrooms are unprepared to handle the paywall battle because the end result of its current handling is a situation where everyone loses. If paywalls continue to push readers away, more people will try to bypass them, sharing information in ways where there’s no credit and few places for fact checking. There’s a clear fatigue that at the same time newsrooms are begging for audience attention, they’re seemingly pushing it away by paywalling their content. But if journalists lose funding, audiences will suffer — because it means less reporting and more AI slop, SEO explainers, and basic, uninspired news.”
- Amazing new penguin discovered for first time in over 100 years via Discover Wildlife. I just think it’s important that we all know that a new penguin species was identified!
- Stunning Roman-era mosaic discovered in Turkey features ‘Emerald’ the cat and ‘Ocean’ the dog via LiveScience. I’m not crying, you’re crying!
Media
Last weekend we went to see Coyote vs. Acme, a movie that, I’m learning, almost no one has heard of. I only heard about it because some of the good people of Tumblr got really excited about it and that made me excited. It’s based on the Looney Tunes characters of the Coyote and the Roadrunner. Coyote, after decades of getting blown up by faulty Acme contraptions, sees an ad for a personal injury lawyer who sues Acme for its poorly made cartoon products, and hires him. From there, well, hijinks ensue. It was a lot of fun, which is not surprising to me because I have always enjoyed Looney Tunes. I also appreciated whatever brand of existential trouble is happening in this movie to make people on the internet write reviews along the lines of “we have to wonder: does Sisyphus love his boulder?”.
Moving It
I’ve mostly been doing pool and a little extra for my physical enrichment time. This is partly due to being busy and partly to the heat! It shouldn’t be 100 degrees in October! I am enjoying that the days are getting shorter and it’s dark by the time water aerobics is over. I love being in the pool at night! I hope everyone is enjoying my sticker reports. Here are the latest:
Kitchen Witchery
When I was at the farmers market two weeks ago, I saw that tomatoes were available and decided it must be time to make tomato soup. I had never made tomato soup from scratch before and I was very pleased with how this once turned out and how easy it was to make. I used the roasted tomato and pepper soup recipe from the Cool Beans cookbook and, yes, it does have beans in it. I used large white lima beans because that seemed like a good fit. I don’t remember what bean the recipe calls for specifically, but I think any white bean would work fine. I also bought a big bag of onions at the farmers market with intentions of making french onion something or other and settled on Smitten Kitchen’s french onion baked lentils, which is one we always like. Finally, I made another batch of broccoli cheddar beans, but I added shell noodles and, like last time I made it, chose not to bother with making croutons as the recipe calls for. This is a perfect recipe when I don’t really want to make something because I can use a bag of frozen broccoli and whatever beans I have in the freezer (I always have something in there) and it takes almost no effort.
As for treats, I have been seeing a bunch of “donut loaves” on instagram and I finally tried the cornbread variation. The idea is what if donut … but one loaf of bread. So it’s a quick bread with a donut-y flavor and texture that you glaze the hell out of. I liked it! I want to try some of the other recipes.
I thought I’d share yesterday’s farmers market findings. I bought a bunch of tomatoes and peppers with the intention of making that soup again. I’m doing a soup potluck next week and and planning to bring the tomato soup (soup spoilers?). I also got some delicata squash, onions, green beans, and a baguette! There’s a guy who sells bread at the farmers market but we usually arrive too late to get any. Yesterday we went relatively early, so I was blessed with fresh bread.
Cat Therapy
Fritz started Prozac last week and I think it’s helping? It’s hard to say for sure because SSRIs always take some time to get into the system. In any case, we have been having more success with him peeing in the litter box, or at least peeing in the bathroom next to the box, so this is good for the mood in our house.
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
