Hello, friends and enemies. Given the abysmal state of the internet, I’m writing a few posts about how to find information, starting with this one about how to find and access books. There are a lot of reasons to read books, and not just get lost in reading bits and pieces on the internet (although that has its place). I’m not going to make this into an essay on the importance of reading, but I will note that academics have noted that “higher levels of educational attainment appear to mitigate the tendency toward authoritarian preferences and attitudes” and that reading more “is a significant predictor of democratic citizenship.” Plus—this may be controversial—reading is fun! It gives us things to think about and to discuss with our friends. Telling stories is part of being human and reading can connect us with our cultural heritage. Or, as one author recently put it, “I think people who care about literature need to make this argument, relentlessly: that everybody deserves to have access to these stories, that they’re cool and good and fun, that not everything in the world needs to help advance you up the ladder, that there’s more to being alive than work and posting and gaining influence, that winning isn’t in fact everything.”
from Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis”
This post discusses what are two separate, but connected, concepts: discovering interesting things to read and figuring out how to access those things. I explain how I find out about books and provide information about where you can get the books, often for free.
Local Public Library
Of course I am starting by recommending your public library! It’s the easiest way to get free books and support access to books for your community. The majority of public libraries let you sign up online and you can get ebooks and e-audiobooks too. If you don’t know where your library is in the world or on the internet, get online and search “[city name] public library.” If you’re in California, you can also use this tool from the California State Library to find your local library.
If there’s a specific book you want but the library doesn’t have it, you can probably ask the library to buy it for you. Most public libraries let you request materials. It’s possible that they will deny your request (it has happened to me), but they are likely to grant it (this has also happened to me!). Here’s the Sacramento Public Library request form, for example. If you can’t figure out how to request materials, search the library website (not the catalog), or go talk to a librarian. I promise librarians want nothing more than to help people find out about things, so they will be happy to help you.
Beyond simply browsing for books, I subscribe to the Sacramento library’s new book alerts newsletter. I find out about new things and I know the library has them! It’s very convenient and I’m sure many libraries have a similar service.
I have installed a web browser tool called Library Extension to easily find out if my library has a book available. After setting up the extension, it asks for your local library. Whenever you’re on a page about a book, the extension checks if your library has it and if it’s available. You can add multiple libraries, including the Internet Archive Open Library. It is a great reminder to use the library and it helps me spend less money on books!
Physical bookshops
Independent bookstores are also a great place to find books. The people there are usually very well informed and there are bookstores that specialize in certain genres or subjects, like The Ripped Bodice for romance books, Mysterious Galaxy for science fiction and fantasy, or Book Larder for cookbooks. Go walk around the bookstore and see what you find! If you don’t know if there are any independent bookstores near you, you can check the Indiebound bookstore finder or bookshop.org’s bookstore map.
Your local bookstore probably also has a newsletter that talks about new books and events. I subscribe to newsletters for a few bookstores, so I hear about a lot of new books that way.
Don’t forget about local used bookstores! Second-hand bookshops seem to have the wildest treasures and they are not as focused on stocking new releases as other bookstores.
Internet Libraries and eBooks
I love that the internet makes it possible to access so many cool things! There are online libraries available, with a wide variety of books and materials. If I’m buying ebooks online, I usually use kobo, but you do not have to buy books at all The public library has ebooks, and many free online libraries exist. Here are some of the big ones:
art by Frogwitch
Queer Liberation Library: You have to join to access the library but it is totally free. The site describes it’s collection as “Queer books! That’s it.”
Open Library by the Internet Archive. This is a huge collection that you can borrow from and read online. There are lots of out-of-print works, but plenty of modern stuff too.You have to make an account, but it’s free.
JSTOR is a site for academic works and they have a collection of over 13,000 open access books, which means they are freely available to everyone. I’ve been using JSTOR for a while because they let you access their scholarly articles even if you’re not connected to an academic institution as long as you make an account (you can read 100 per month!), but I only just learned they had such a big collection of books.
Open Culture: A selection of mostly classics that you can read online or in other ebook formats. Open Culture has a lot of media beyond books, too.
Project MUSE: Another repository of academic work. This one focuses on humanities and social sciences.
Open Research Library is a collection of over 14,000 open access books. The main page looks a little off-putting to me but I assure you there are real books here.
Directory of Open Access Books, more mostly academic reading. This might seem repetitive, but open-access academic work is important. A lot of these books can be difficult to find and very expensive, so the more repositories we have, the better.
Publisher Newsletters
Another way I find books to read is through publisher newsletters. Publishers want you to know about their books, so basically every publisher has some kind of service to let you know what is new. If you don’t want newsletters, most of them have social media of one form or another that you can follow too. If you aren’t sure who publishes the books you read, just check the cover page of a book and it will tell you, then you can look them up.
Here are some that I follow:
The University of Chicago Press has gives newsletter subscribers a free ebook every month!
I like science fiction so I subscribe to the newsletters for both Tor and Orbit Books.
Haymarket Books has a lot of great nonfiction on the state of the world and what to do about it. They often run sales and you can get ebooks for cheap. Sometimes they give ebooks away, like these books about Palestine.
I’ve recently started following AK Press. It has a similar vibe to Haymarket but with a slightly different focus.
Follow Authors Online
Authors are readers as much as they are writers. They often post about what they’re reading and what they liked. If I like a book, I look up the author on BlueSky or instagram (or whatever social media we’re using) and follow them. If I love an author, I’ll find their website (just search “[author name]” or “[author name] website”) and sign up for their newsletter. Basically every published author has a newsletter to at least announce new books. I find a lot to read from what authors are talking about online. Some authors, like Cory Doctorow or Mary Robinette Kowal go out of their way to share interviews and reviews, which is also a great source for finding interesting things to read.
Organizing Your Reading List
It is probably impossible to read all the books that I have saved in my TBR (to be read) list. My method of keeping my reading wishlist organized these days is to add things to my “to read” list on StoryGraph, which you can sort and filter. Sometimes I use it to browse books I’ve indicated that I own and want to read. It’s a good way to see what I already have, especially since many of my books are digital.
Talk to Your Friends
Even though reading is something you do by yourself, it doesn’t need to be something you do alone. I get tons of reading recommendations from my friends because they also like to read! We often joke in the group chat about the never-ending TBR. Talking about what you read with people you enjoy is one of life’s great pleasures! Ask your friends what they’ve been reading! Share your thoughts about the books you read! Sometimes we plan to read a book together and discuss it as we go, which is also very enjoyable. You can also follow your friends on social reading sites, like StoryGraph, to see what your friends are reading (here’s my profile!). I find out about a lot of books this way.
Coming Soon
I am hoping to make this into a series about using the internet and finding information today. I am thinking about writing about how to search and find things online, and how to avoid misinformation. I know plenty of people have covered these topics, but I hope I can add something to the conversation. If there’s something specific you want to see me explain, let me know!
Hello, friends and enemies. Hey, so, everything is happening. 2025 really decided to start with a bang. I would love to believe that we’re getting the year’s madness out of the way and it is going to be smooth sailing from now to December. Unfortunately, Trump is being inaugurated for his second term on Monday so I have no illusions about what is to come.
L.A. Is on Fire
Two huge fires started in the Los Angeles metro after a windstorm snapped power lines. The fires are still burning. Cal Fire reports that the Palisades fire has burned almost 24,000 acres and is 39% contained; the Eaton fire in Alta Dena burned over 14,000 acres but is about two-thirds contained. That’s a tremendous amount of destruction and a huge health risk for everyone in the valley breathing that air.
Disasters are happening everywhere all the time but it feels much more emotionally close to home to see L.A. on fire. I grew up in southern California and I still live in the state so it is feels very real to see it on fire. A lot of people, Californians and non-Californians alike are emotionally attached to the area since we’ve been seeing it on TV our whole lives (one friend sent me a link about the status of the house they used for the Golden Girls being at risk, for example). It’s also very scary to see a disaster affect such a populated area and feel totally powerless about it. This tweet I included in the emergency kit post last week basically sums up the mood. L.A. is not that far away from me! And it’s very close to some of my family.
Aside from the global warming of it all, I remain concerned about housing issues. I feel like I’m repeating myself, but I will say again that we are operating in a climate where homelessness is criminalized and forced prison labor is legal. The Onion has already published an article titled LAPD Arrests Everyone Who Lost Home In Fire, so I’m far from the only one thinking about this. We already have a housing crisis in this state and a bunch of working-class people’s homes just burned down. Seems like that could end badly! Where will all those people go? Will the replacement houses be affordable? Landlords are already price gouging. It’s despicable behavior. If your reaction to a natural disaster is to immediately raise rents, you should not be allowed to be a landlord ever again and should probably get in line for the guillotine.
I hope that the state finds the political will after this disaster to raise wages for incarcerated fire fighters and make it possible for them to get firefighting jobs upon release. If the state government can’t figure it out now, when there’s more good feelings for firefighters than ever, then we’re never going to get it. Even Kim Kardashian wants them to get paid more. If this fire had come before the election, maybe the subject would have gotten enough people to vote for ending involuntary servitude as a punishment for a crime.
If you’ve been here for a while, you know it’s hard for me to do nothing when things are bothering me. Last weekend I wrote this emergency kit post about how to be ready to go if something terrible happens. I hope I never need it but I feel better knowing I’m reasonably prepared to deal with a disaster. I’ve also seen a lot of ways to donate to people affected by the fires. A number of people have already aggregated a lot of GoFundMe campaigns and other ways to directly support people because it takes a long time to get insurance and FEMA money. Here are some ways you can send money to people who need it right now.
For anyone affected by the fires, I am not the best source but I wanted to share a couple of things I’ve seen:
Mutual Aid L.A. resource list organized by date and location. There are lots of clothing drives and other distribution events.
The LA Times published a big list of places giving out free or discounted goods and services to anyone displaced by the fires.
Just about all these campaigns and resources are mutual aid. This is us being here for our fellow citizens. The government is not prepared to help at the scale and speed that is needed (I saw on instagram that the city of LA was asking a mutual aid group for masks. What? Doesn’t the city have money for this shit?). Consider this yet another reminder that we all have to take care of each other. Donating even five dollars to someone who needs it can help. We can’t all do everything for everyone, but if we all do something for someone, we’re going to get through this.
Social Media Apocalypse
Meta and TikTok have both been serving as sources of concern and insanity.
Moderation is Over
Facebook declared this week that content moderation is over, offering us more evidence that we cannot rely on tech companies to mediate our human relationships. If you missed it, Zuckerberg said Meta (parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) said it will replace fact checking with “a community-driven system similar to X’s Community Notes.” The platform will no longer be moderating hate speech, which includes “removing rules that forbid insults about a person’s appearance based on race, ethnicity, national origin, disability, religious affiliation, caste, sexual orientation, sex, gender identity and serious disease.” This means that the internet experience is about to get really ugly for anyone other than heterosexual, able-bodied, cisgender white men. A former Meta employee said that they “really think this is a precursor for genocide.” This is not hyperbole given that facebook has played a role in fanning genocidal flames before. Some experts are saying that Meta is basically repeating the behavior that led to the genocide against the Rohingya people in Myanmar, and “laying the narrative ground work for … mass deportations” here in the US.
We really have to stop using services that are taking advantage of us and making the world worse on purpose. I thought for sure I had written about this in detail before but the closest posts I had were about not using Spotify anymore and some information about internet privacy when the Supreme Court repealed Roe v. Wade. Facebook is a shambolic mess of a platform that is forcing AI slop into our feeds and keeping our friends from seeing our posts. I’ve been trying to organize events through facebook recently and many people told me that facebook didn’t even show them the event that they were explicitly invited to. It’s not even doing the thing it was ostensibly built to do.
I know the concept of not using facebook or instagram is daunting and scary. What if my friends never talk to me again? I get it! I quick facebook in 2014 and stayed away for a year or two until roller derby dragged my ass back into the ecosystem. However, using social media is not a sustainable way to live or connect with others. We trade our data and sanity and convenience. It’s so easy to see a funny video and send it to my friends and when they say “haha so true,” we are strengthening our friendship. We also didn’t have to make any effort and, it turns out, relationships take energy, even if they’re with our most favorite people. Effort is at a premium because it is so difficult to live. We’re all working a ton and managing our households and trying to clean and cook and exercise and go to the dentist every six months. No one was meant to do all this alone (or even with just one other person). Our social lives are what we end up sacrificing. Facebook and instagram and tiktok are here to sweep up the little pieces of socialization we can fit into the day.
I have a few suggestions for how to reduce our dependence on Meta and other social media. I think the hardest thing to replace is groups. We used to have forums! Anyone could start a website and put a forum in it. Then Reddit and facebook replaced them all. I don’t know how to replace the local Buy Nothing group that operates through facebook or the Rancho Gordo Bean Club group. That’s okay. I don’t have to know everything, but I do know that spending less time on social media and finding real ways to interact with your people is a net good. Any time we spend outside of the Meta (or Twitter or whatever) ecosystem is time that belongs to ourselves.
Here are some suggestions for connecting with friends and family without a technocratic middleman. I know they require more work than giving a heart to a post, but the upside is you will get to have a real conversation instead of feeling like you’re posting into an empty void. Call me a diva, but I would rather have a conversation with three people than get 50 likes on my post.
Text or instant messaging: I am surely dating myself, but remember hanging out on AIM, MSN messenger, or ICQ and chatting with your friends? Wasn’t that great? Good news, this technology is still available and you can talk to your friends all the time (and I do!). Get phone numbers and use your phone’s text message or use a dedicated, encrypted messaging app like Signal. I enjoy Signal because the things I say don’t get turned into ads!
Letters or email: Yes, I am basically just suggesting long text messages (lol). Honestly, even sending birthday cards or holiday cards is a good way to stay in touch. I realized this year that I could send holiday cards just to tell people I’m glad they’re my friends. That was always allowed! If managing your address book feels too hard, you can use Postable to get your friends’ addresses and send cards. Though, in my experience, if you just ask a friend for their address and tell them you want to send them something, no one will be mad. In fact, they’re going to be happy that you want to send them something!
Federated social media is supposed to be an antidote to corporate sites like facebook. I’m not an expert on this, but the idea is that you can leave a social media site and take all your connections and history with you, even if your friends don’t leave. This might sound crazy after 15+ years of facebook use, but it is possible using the magic of computers. Cory Doctorow has two posts that explain the concept well, one using the metaphor of a fire escape and another that talks about the benefits of federation more broadly. So far, the only federated social media spaces I know about are Pixelfed, an instagram replacement, and Mastadon.
Make real-world plans with your friends. Again, I know this is very hard because we are all busy. But this is the “community” they’re talking about when they say “you need to build community.” Your friends are your community! One of the best things to do is have a standing activity. You know I get tired fast, so I, personally, would not commit to anything weekly, but I love this article on having a weekly spaghetti night with whoever wants to show up. I have been hosting quarterly food parties with my friend (Souper Bowl II is coming up!). I have another friend who comes over for dinner every other week. Facebook can’t and shouldn’t attempt to replace this shit! Make plans to get ice cream when a new flavor comes out at your favorite shop! Go see every new Keanu Reeves movie! I don’t know! There are literally no rules and life is supposed to be fun.
Start your own blog or website. I am definitely biased because I’m running my own blog on a website that I own(!) and I think this is a great way to put thoughts into the world. I recognize that not everyone has the interest or technical knowledge to do all that. However, there are some easy options to set up your own blog or site. First, you can make a WordPress blog for free (WordPress is the system I use for my blog). Second, you can make a free website on neocities. Fellow internet natives probably remember GeoCities; neocities is using the same concept in an attempt to revive the internet and make it fun and interesting instead of a group of five websites containing screenshots of the other four.
Sign up for newsletters. This one isn’t really a “family and friends” suggestion, but any artist, author, academic, local shop, etc. you follow on social media almost certainly has a newsletter and they are probably exhausted with trying to appease the algorithm. You can subscribe to their newsletters to keep up with them! Shameless reminder: you can subscribe to this blog and get it delivered to your email! Here’s the subscription page.
Just in case it needs to be said: I am also not perfect at any of this. It’s so much easier to use social media but I do think it isn’t helping us as much as we think. I say that as a low-energy being who really loves the internet and probably wouldn’t have nearly as many or as good friends as I do without it. I think it’s important that we are continuously interrogating how we use this technology that didn’t exist 20 years ago (I know facebook literally existed 20 years ago but the way it is now is unrecognizable from, say, 2004 facebook). We don’t have to be perfect, we just have to put some effort in the right direction.
The Propaganda Isn’t Working Like It Used To
TikTok, the preferred social media app of young people and people with ADHD (I assume. All those short videos have to be doing something for my neurodivergent comrades but I find them overwhelming), is being shut down in the U.S. as of today. I have not been following this story very closely because I don’t use TikTok, yet I do find it troubling that our government would rather ban a company from doing business here instead of pass actual regulations that would protect our data online. If TikTok is letting China access our data, why don’t we make it harder for any corporation to take our data? Ah, but then we have to regulate the Silicon Valley companies and they make too many campaign contributions.
Multiple people have argued that the real reason the US wants to ban TikTok is “because it has become a hub for progressive activism” In User Mag, Taylor Lorenz relays the findings from a study that found “TikTok is the only platform where left-leaning news influencers outnumber right-leaning ones. TikTok also has more than double the concentration of news content creators who identify as LGBTQ+ or advocate for LGBTQ+ rights, and 73% of teens who identify as Democrats or lean left use TikTok, compared to 52% of teens who identify as Republican.” I think TikTok has shown people in the US a lot of information about other places that we wouldn’t have seen, or that would have been filtered through a different perspective. Through social media, and TikTok specifically, a lot of us heard directly from Palestinians, something we probably would not have been able to do otherwise. I’m sure this played a big part in motivating the student protests last spring, which seemed to really freak out our institutions and people in power.
There also seems to be a very real argument to be made that TikTok is being banned because Meta can’t compete with it (but … the free market! [sarcasm]) and has been spending tons of money to lobby against it. We know that Zuckerberg buys companies he can’t compete with or builds a copycat in the Meta ecosystem when he can’t. That’s why it’s so deeply hilarious that “In only two days, more than 700,000 new users joined Xiaohongshu,” or Red Note, in English, which is kind of like a Chinese version of Instagram. The app is in Mandarin. It’s for Chinese people. TikTok users’ reactions can basically be summed up as:
There’s no telling if this will last, but the memes, for now, are extremely funny (lots of “My Chinese spy is here! I thought I’d lost you!”). People are apparently attempting to learn at least a little Mandarin to use the app, if Duolingo is any indication. This also seems to be the first time that Chinese people and Americans have been able to directly talk to each other en masse and we seem to be discovering that we’re not so different after all. Chinese people are asking questions like “is it true that Americans have to work two jobs, or is that just propaganda?” I appreciate that Chinese people, unlike many Americans, understand that they are subject to a lot of government propaganda, but unfortunately, we’re not beating the “need two jobs to live” allegations.
As funny as this all is, I am concerned that, especially for younger users, that they may not just be ironically embracing China. I get that the US is doing some terrible stuff and China and the US have an adversarial relationship. However, opposing the US doesn’t automatically make China good. I think individual people from our respective countries interacting is a straightforward good thing. China as a country though is actively committing genocide against the Uyghur people. The government is anti-LGBT (I also read a bit about this topic a few years ago in Betraying Big Brother: The Feminist Awakening in China). And have people already forgotten about the protests in Hong Kong? I am far from an expert on China and I know the US is not doing much better on human rights issues (we, too, are bankrolling a genocide, backsliding on LGBTQ rights, and squashing protest). I know we all love to be online, but I hope everyone can temper their China enthusiasm with a little reality. Although for now, we can at least enjoy the memes and envy their functioning rail system.
Books and Other Words
La nostalgia de la Mujer Anfibio
I am feeling good about having already read a whole book in Spanish this year (although I admittedly started it in December)! La nostalgia de la Mujer Anfibio by Cristina Sánchez-Andrade starts with a shipwreck on the shores of the Island in Sálvora off of Spain’s western coast the morning of Lucha’s wedding. Lucha does not want to get married and hooks up with one of the shipwrecked men, but goes on with the wedding anyway (wild choice!). The story goes on to narrate Lucha’s lack of connection to her daughter, who later moves to England, and the stronger connection she forges with her granddaughter, whom her daughter delivers to Lucha shortly before passing away. It’s still a little hard for me to get all the finer points of a novel in Spanish but I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to keep track of the plot a lot better than I have with books in the past. Perhaps I am learning something! The gist of the story is that all these old people in this small town are simmering with old grudges and secrets and it seems to be making them all miserable. Lucha’s daughter left because she was a lesbian (huge, open secret), Lucha’s husband always knew that their daughter wasn’t biologically his (big secret), and Lucha’s letters from her “shipwrecked lover” are forgeries (secrets and betrayal!). Things start to change when a hippy calling himself Ziggy Stardust comes to town and starts playing records for everyone in the town square to jog their memories. Cheers to the power of gay men bearing pop music?
Beans: A History
I was unfortunately disappointed by Beans: A History by Ken Albala. You may think that a history of beans would be inherently boring, but no, I am interested in beans. I think this book should actually be called Beans: A Western Cultural History. It is organized into chapters about different types of beans, but nearly every chapter is stuck on the same thesis that beans in western culture have traditionally been a low-status food that people eschew when they can afford something better. Every chapter also came back around to any given bean’s usage in Europe or the US. Even the chapter on Phaseolus vulgaris, beans that originated in the Americas, mostly talks about Europe. We get a few pages about beans originating somewhere then we’re back to white people. Truly maddening. The closest this book gets to focusing on somewhere else is the chapter on soy, but even that does eventually migrate to what we’re doing with it in the west. I was interested in the parts that were about the history of a bean but how can there be a whole book about beans that glosses over so many parts of the world?
Meanwhile, on the internet:
Scoop: Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ Wikipedia editors via Forward. Great, I can’t wait to get targeted for editing Wikipedia. I love (sarcasm again) the dichotomy of “Wikipedia is unreliable!” versus “People editing Wikipedia are actively harming us and should be targeted.” So stupid.
The Year I Embraced the Potluck via Eater. 2024 was also the year I embraced the potluck and I loved it. I can’t wait for Souper Bowl II.
Third Space? You Can’t Handle a Third Space. via Midwesthetic. Everyone says they want a third space (a community place that is not work or home), but people are unwilling to deal with the inherent discomfort of being in public. Community is necessary but not always easy.
I know I said I planned to read more in Spanish this year, and I am, but I did not plan to read Don Quijote in the original Spanish. Yet, here I am. My dear friend Lito wanted to read it this year and I decided to come along for the ride and the discussion (which, by the way, has been so much fun, even though I’m very behind on the reading). Since I can’t be normal about anything, I’m reading in Spanish. It is challenging but also not quite as terrible as I expected. I also didn’t expect it to be as funny as it is. I guess these classic works have staying power for a reason. It is definitely going to take me months to get through this, but I wanted to get it on the record that this is happening, as insane as that is.
Kitchen Witchery
I tried a baked oatmeal recipe because I eat oatmeal for breakfast but sometimes struggle to find the motivation to make a bowl of oatmeal every morning. This photo doesn’t look like much, but I was happy with how it turned out. I skipped the prescribed fruit and just did nuts on top, plus mixed in some flax meal. I had a version of this I was making with steel-cut oats but I realized that I don’t think those oats are doing my apparently extremely sensitive guts any favors.
baked oatmeal topped with walnuts
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. I remain obsessed with this creature.
Big loungingFlat catthese photos never stop being funny to me
In Monica Byrne’s novel The Actual Star, a novel partially set in a post-apocalyptic future where humans have made serious modifications to their bodies and culture to survive, she uses the term “Age of Emergency” to refer to the period “when unchecked capitalism led to an unprecedented spike in accumulations of capital, wealth, populations, and computing power worldwide, resulting in mass extinction, catastrophic climate change, and human displacement on a global scale.” I keep coming back to this term because it seems to be such an apt description of the current poly-crisis. All science fiction is commentary on the present, and Byrne intentionally described the our era a time of emergency. We’re in it. We see disaster every week. At the moment, half of Los Angeles is on fire and the south-eastern US is frozen. I can’t do anything about that, but it does make me feel better to think about being prepared for an emergency and to help my friends with the same.
Unfortunately, we are all of us stuck with the task of surviving our negligent (at best) institutions while the world burns. One thing that helps me feel less anxious is being prepared for disaster. Obviously, I’m not talking about building a bunker, but just having some essentials ready to go in case there’s a fire, flood, earthquake, a cyber-terrorism event that knocks out the power grid, or you know, other unforeseen horror.
By popular demand (at least two people said they would use this information), I am making a list of what’s in my emergency kit and what I am planning to add to my kit. My kit isn’t fully assembled, so this is half stuff I have and half stuff I still need. I like sifting through this kind of information, but it does take time and mental energy that not everyone has, especially for people who don’t respond to potential crisis by wanting to read more.
art by Frogwitch
A few of my assumptions into this are that no one is using a kit to survive long-term in the woods or whatever. I assume we are in community in some way and not doing everything totally alone, even if it means you’re in an evacuation shelter or somewhere non-ideal. However, emergencies can isolate us so we need to be able to survive for a short while until we can rejoin others. I also don’t think you need to go drop $1000 and buy everything new and right now. Spread out the purchases over time—better to have something than nothing (again, survival is going to be collaborative). Check out your local second-hand sources or buy-nothing group to see if there’s anything you can use. I am putting together a kit for me and Kirk as well as my close friend Mandy and her young daughter who live close to us. So some of the links in the list are multi-packs for the whole fam. You can adjust for your situation and buy individual things or help your chosen family build their kits!
Sources
I used the following guides for inspiration because I’m not an expert. I just like looking things up and organizing them (and writing these things helps me too). You could refer to these and figure out your own kit if you like! I am including links for the specific stuff I have or intend to acquire to make it easier for anyone who doesn’t have the time or energy for all that.
It’s probably helpful to distinguish between a go bag and an emergency kit. Most of the survival-type stuff and basics in the following list are things I keep in a backpack that I could grab on my way out the door if I had zero notice and had to leave now. The rest of the stuff is what I think of as an extended emergency kit. It’s what you’d grab if you had 15 minutes to get out of the house. For me, this would of course involve the go bags and collecting my cat. I would get my purse, laptop and phone, box of important documents, medication, and probably my CPAP because I need that to live. We have a box of camping stuff in our garage so that would also go into the car along with any water container (I have been meaning to get one to put in the garage). If you don’t have a garage, you could keep everything together in a closet. Personally, because I am fat, I would also throw as many clothes as possible into a suitcase because I do not imagine any clothes getting donated in an emergency response are things I would be able to wear. Maybe that’s just anxiety but I have lived as a fat person long enough to know it’s not always easy to find something to wear! I’m not saying I need to be fashionable in an emergency.
I will add here that I’m not really writing about food to add to an emergency kit because I know I will not rotate it regularly. I treat my pantry as emergency food supplies. I know I have enough beans and rice and flour and cooking oil to get through a few days of crisis (at least). I’m not putting weird dehydrated food in my garage about it. Keeping your pantry stocked with ramen packets also counts as emergency preparedness. The important thing is you have a little extra food of whatever you actually eat on hand.
The Stuff
Here is stuff I have bought or plan to buy for my kit. None of these are affiliate links. There are some Amazon links because it’s unfortunately the easiest place to buy random shit like this also people act like their gift cards are cash so I had some store credit. You should get things from whatever is most accesible for you.
Basics
A bag to put things in. You do not need a fancy backpack but I bought backpacks in bright orange that hang just inside our garage so we could theoretically grab them on the way to the car. I checked a few sites to see what bags they have on sale. Here’s a yellow backpack from Columbia on sale right now. I’ve noticed bright-orange and yellow bags are often on sale. They are not necessarily fashionable but they will be easy to spot! You could alternately get a big box to put things in, but I prefer the idea of having everything in a portable bag in case we have to walk.
Safety whistle. presumably so you don’t have to scream to be found if it comes to that.
Glasses, I keep a pair of old glasses and sunglasses in my emergency kit (because the last thing I want is to be fucking blind when everything is on fire) and lens wipes or cleaning cloth. I use the little wet wipe lens cleaners because I have issues with my glasses getting scratched up otherwise. I used to use these little cloths that bundle up into a pouch.
Tampons, pads, menstrual cup, or whatever you use to manage your period.
Respiratorso you can breathe when there is a fire. We have the 3M 6502QL masks, currently on sale for $24 at the link.
KN95 masks in case you have to shelter with others in an ongoing pandemic. They are also better than nothing if you don’t have a respirator. We buy these in bulk since we mask in public.
Hand sanitizer, any kind is fine.
A first aid kit that includes any over-the-counter medications that are important for you. I am going to include some voltaren gel for artritis into mine because I am effectively an old woman. My stomach is always fucked up so I’m also going to make sure I have pepto bismol and emesis bags.
Water bottles. I put old Nalgene bottles in our go bags and bought a Life Straw for each. The life straw is a water filter that you can insert to the bottle and screw in with a lid. Any water you already have will work for your kit and you can compatible Life Straws for most types. Another lightweight water bottle, if you need a suggestion, is Sigg. I have some that I don’t use anymore so that is another kit option for me.
Compact microfiber towel. I have the regular full-sized towel and washcloth sizes for everyone. You can probably find them on sale if you look around. These are also nice to take if you’re traveling (and following the guidance of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy).
Emergency crank weather radio, so you can get updates if everything else is down. You only need one of these for your group, so coordinate with your friends or family.
Leatherman skeletool RX. These are a little expensive, but it’s seven tools in one tiny package, so it’s handy for any situations you may find yourself in. This is another item that I assume would be shared among your group.
Solar lantern. We have this inflatable solar lantern. I haven’t actually used it yet, but it seems like a light-weight way to keep a source of illumination handy.
Fresnel lens to use the sun for lighting a fire (it’s basically a magnifying glass).
Emergency blankets. This is a four-back of “huge” blankets, which seems like a nice idea to me because it sounds miserable not to have enough emergency blanket to wrap around my fat bod if it comes to that.
Headlamp or flashlight. I’m a big fan of headlamps, and I actually have one I use around the house when light is needed. The headlamp in the link looks good because it won’t turn on by accident in your bag and you can recharge it or use AAA batteries.
Rain poncho. Some people recommend converting a plastic bag into a poncho if you need one. Sure, this is an option, but if it’s flooding and raining like crazy, I’d rather spend the extra five dollars and not wear a trash bag. I don’t know what kind we have because we bought them on one of our many ill-fated rainy camping trips, but you can get the super cheap disposable ones here. If a rain-based crisis is likely in your area, it might be worth having a slightly nicer poncho.
Hygiene stuff: Travel toothbrush (like this or this), toothpaste tablets (I like these from Lush but I am bougie) or travel toothpaste, hair ties, ear plugs, soap strips, chapstick, nail clippers, floss, deodorant, sunscreen, tiny hair brush (this one folds and has a little mirror), dry shampoo, wet wipes, qtips, and whatever you need to not feel disgusting.
An extra copy of your house key. I haven’t done this yet, but I think keeping an extra key is a good idea in case you need to leave in a hurry and can’t find your keys.
A change of clothes. I’ve got a tank top, not-my-favorite-but-still-good socks and underwear, and these pants from Alder apparel that are for hiking and camping or whatever. They are good pants, I just don’t wear them that often so they’re in the bag.
Cash money. Remember when all the computers broke that one weekend? Keep a little cash handy just in case.
Miscellaneous Handy Items
What is handy to you may depend a lot on where you are and what disasters are likely, plus what is important for your health and comfort, but here are some general ideas:
Insect repellent because I will go insane if I have to be in a disaster AND get mosquito bites.
Sunscreen. Again, if I have to be horrifically sunburned in a crisis, I will fucking lose it. SPF 50 is recommended.
Portable power station. This is effectively a giant battery because I can’t sleep without my CPAP. I bought it after the last time the power was out all night and I stayed awake until it came back on at 5 am. It’s definitely too big for the go bag, but it is something I would want if I was loading up my car.
Portable CPAP. This is highly specific to me and expensive. I have been meaning to buy one of these mini CPAPs for travel or emergency situations. You should get whatever you need for your circumstances.
Mess kit. I bought one of these Light My Fire mess kits years ago to use when traveling and I’ve found them to be extremely handy! This is also a reminder that your emergency stuff doesn’t have to only be for emergencies. I’ve taken this with me to RollerCon, for example. If you don’t want the whole kit, it might be useful to at least have your own spork.
Paracord in case you need to tie or hang something. Black and neon yellow are the cheapest as of this writing.
Carabiner, probably useful for something. Why would you not want to have a carabiner?
Matches in a waterproof container. You could also get some kind of flint or other fire starter but, realistically, it’s matches for me.
Sun hat. I am thinking of getting one of these or something like it so the sun doesn’t destroy my delicate constitution. Depending on where you live, a storm hat might be a better choice.
Compass and local maps. You might need to navigate to an emergency shelter without Google maps. The Thomas Maps are probably too cumbersome to keep in a backpack, but are good to keep in the car. You could also get a smaller local map to keep in your go bag.
I only know about cats. If you have a dog or other pet, adjust accordingly. People with dogs are probably more used to taking their dog places and may not need all this advice.
Pet water bottle. This seems so useful. Instead of needing a water bowl and having to put water back in the bottle after, you can release a little water into the connected dish for your pet to drink from! Navy blue is currently the cheapest color.
Cat harness, which is probably worth trying to get the cat used to before any crisis, but I haven’t tried it with Fritz at all. I used to put it on Huey and let her flop in the sun on the back patio.
I don’t have a dedicated cat carrier in the kit, but I know where mine is and I leave it out in the house all the time so Fritz doesn’t think it’s something that only shows up when it’s time to do something scary. Sometimes he hangs out in there. I know this may be harder to do if you live in a small space.
Any favorite, small toys and treats are good to add to the kit too.
Documents
I’m planning to scan (but you could also take a phone photo) all my important documents and add them to my laptop, which I would presumably grab in an emergency, and to an encrypted USB drive. Here are instructions for encrypting a USB drive: https://nordvpn.com/blog/how-to-encrypt-flash-drive/
Have copies of:
Passport
Drivers license
Immunization (you and your pets)
Pet license or chip info
Car, house, or health insurance info
Prescriptions for medication, glasses, etc.
Deeds to your car, house, etc.
Bank account information
If you use a password safe program, a copy of your passwords
Additionally, it’s good to have a list of contact numbers for your home/renters insurance, doctor, health insurance, and vet. You could put that in a list on your phone or simply add them to your contacts. You also want to have contact information available for a friend or family member outside of your area so you can let them know your status or get help. We can either bring back memorizing phone numbers, keep your contacts on your drive, or make a list and keep it in a plastic pouch in your bag.
I’ve also made a list on my phone of everything in my go bag so I know what’s in there and don’t have to guess.
Sanity
I get the impression that a lot of time during a crisis is spent waiting around and being anxious. It is not frivolous to pack a few things to help you de-stress and relax. Everyone will have their own ideas about what to pack for entertainment, but here are some ideas that I quite like:
A paper book, probably something you already know you like like and don’t mind re-reading, maybe even something that would be fun to read aloud.
If you still have one, an old MP3 player or iPod and some wired headphones. They do still make MP3 players, but you could also probably pick up an iPod for cheap on ebay, or even load up an old cell phone with music to listen to offline (and if you don’t have any MP3 music anymore and would like some, please talk to me privately!).
I saw a suggestion for these handheld retro game emulators (basically a modern gameboy that has all the games built in) and am now obsessed with it and want one. Kirk says we would of course take the Nintendo Switch in an emergency, but what if we both want to play games at the same time? What if I just want video games in my purse?
A deck of cards, or Uno cards, or any small games you enjoy. You could throw in a travel Scrabble or whatever is going to keep you entertained.
You Made it to the End
This is an ongoing process for me. My emergency kit isn’t “done” but going through this list has helped me take stock of what I have and what I still need. It’s weird to think about this stuff because it’s important to have just in case but we hope to never need it at all, but as I said earlier, I think the odds of any of us never experiencing a disaster are getting lower all the time.
I hope this guide helps you feel ready for disasters and eases your anxiety, as it has mine. If you think I missed anything important, please let me know! Remember to include your close and local friends in your emergency plans. No one survives alone!
Hello, friends and enemies. I like to think that I am not as much of a creature of routine as I am. Sure, I’m autistic and appreciate my routine, but I don’t need it. Well, there’s nothing like the last week or so of the year to disabuse me of that notion. The other night I was freaking out a little bit even though nothing was really wrong and I was feeling generally disregulated. I think exercising—showing up to dance class regularly, for the most part—is doing a huge amount of work in keeping my nervous system from getting too nervous. A week and a half of lying around seems like a great idea until my brain is like “what if … things bad?” Just to be clear, I wasn’t in a dire state but I did start feeling general anxiety and dread. Fortunately, I got Kirk to install some lights in our garage this week so I could go out there and work out even when it’s dark (which, right now, is any time after work). I did a little work out and felt fine the next day. The body is so complex but then all you have to do is run around for a while* and it’s mostly fine (*and take an SSRI).
new garage lighting
Another thing I found stressful this week was I had to set up a 401(k) account because, as of January 1, I now work for the new corporate overlords that acquired the company I work. I’ve written about this before, but it’s essentially impossible to invest in any ethical way. The best performing funds always consist of oil, dystopian tech companies, pharmaceutical companies that are ripping us all off, funds about to start another subprime mortgage crisis, and, like, Blackrock. Unfortunately, our economy is set up to make money on things that are extractive and exhibit “growth,” which is not anything that’s long-term sustainable for us as a species or culture. Yet, it’s the only avenue available to me, and to many of us, to save for retirement. We still don’t know if 401(k)s even work for retirement savings because they were only introduced in the early 1980s, so no one has successfully made it through their retirement on a 401(k) alone. I literally don’t think it’s possible for the vast majority of us to save enough to retire. Per Investopedia, “If you need $100,000 per year to live and you can expect an average return of 5% per year from your 401(k) assets, you would need more than $2 million saved up.” Cool. People (media, rich people, Boomers) often complain about how no one has loyalty to their job anymore. Well, jobs have no loyalty to us. I would stay in a job that offered me a pension, a reliable way to retire. The State of California has a pension and you don’t see many people leaving state service for exactly that reason. So, I did not have fun reckoning with the fact that the only way to provide for my retirement is to invest money in things that I find morally reprehensible and that investment probably won’t even be enough to live out my days.
Doing Holiday Stuff (apparently just making food)
Apparently my last regular post was before Christmas, so here are some updates about the holidays. Kirk’s dad came for dinner on Christmas eve and I made clam chowder (by request, since that’s what his family usually does). Clam chowder is not a complete meal so I also made rolls; a broccoli, onion, and blue cheese tart; and then a Danish almond torte (recipe from The Nordic Baking Book) for dessert because my father in law loves marzipan. The cake was very interesting because I’d never made a yeasted cake or a lattice before, but it turned out quite good. On Christmas itself, Kirk and I just like to hang out. I got some nice things and I mostly spent the day reading my books and watching the Pee Wee’s Playhouse Christmas special. For breakfast, I decided to make my life easy and made a french toast casserole and some bacon. Kirk makes dinner on Christmas day so I didn’t have to do anything! It was kind of weird and annoying having Christmas on a Wednesday because it’s got two days of work on either side of it and barely feels like a big holiday. Alas. Modern life.
Broccoli, onion, and blue cheese tartDanish almond torteChristmas breakfast
New Year’s Eve is kind of my favorite holiday as regular readers can probably tell from my end-of-year posts. The new year always feels full of potential, even though I recognize that the transition from one year to the next is completely arbitrary. Three of my friends came over to hang out and we continued our tradition of watching “weird” movies with a screening of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I’d only seen it once and it was quite a while ago, so it was fun to watch it again with friends. It also had me reminiscing about how some of my friends in middle school knew all the songs so I learned the lyrics just from them, singing it while having literally no clue what it was from or about (hazards of a religious upbringing). Because New Year’s Eve was also Hannukah, we made latkes just before midnight. So we rung in the new year eating potatoes and talking about what we want to do in 2025. This is as it should be.
NYE pizzaNYE latkes
Books and Other Words
The First Bright Thing
The First Bright Thing by J.R. Dawson has a lot of things I love, like a circus and time-traveling lesbians. It’s a story about creating the life you want for yourself, which is a message I strongly subscribe to. The protagonist, Ringmaster, aka Rin, neé Ruth, is a “spark,” someone with a magical ability. She can teleport and time travel. Her abusive ex, the Circus King, can make people do what he wants just by telling them to do it. The story is set after World War I and shows the characters trying to figure out how to live after experiencing the greatest trauma they can imagine and, in the case of Rin and her wife and their best friend, trying to figure out if there’s anything they can do to avoid the next war. They use their circus as a way to spread joy and good feelings wherever they go. Most of us don’t have the ability to personally foresee and attempt avert a war, but we can all aim to encourage our fellow humans to be a little better—and to be better for ourselves and our chosen families.
The City in Glass
The City in Glass by Nghi Vo is about a demon, Vitrine, who loves a city and all the people in it. She’s spent years nudging the city’s development and is on the cusp of finally having a great library built there when a posse of angels arrive to raze the whole place for reasons known only to them. Vitrine is mad as hell about this and curses one of the angels. She stays in the ruins and slowly starts trying to make the city a place where people could live, but she holds a grudge the whole time. She keeps crossing paths with her cursed angel throughout the years and he attempts to pull her out of her grief. He eventually brings her new people to inhabit the city too. That is the basic plot but I don’t feel it describes the book very well. It’s very atmospheric and moody. It made me think a little bit of Good Omens in terms of an unlikely demon-angel relationship, but it isn’t campy like Good Omens is. I enjoyed it and thought it was an interesting short novel.
Shoestring Theory
I loved Shoestring Theory by Mariana Costa, which is a wonderfully entry to a sub-genre that I call “gay wizards” (sibling of “time-traveling lesbians“). Sad magic man and disgraced court mage Cyril is basically yearning for death in a blighted kingdom but casts a spell that might work or might just be suicide to go back in time and keep his husband, the king, from going off the rails and ruining it all. This book was super fun to read. We got the foppish magic boy and his cat familiar, his besties Prince Euphrates and Princess Tigris, evil plots, court gossip. I mean, it’s just good stuff. I must recommend it to all gay magic enjoyers.
Elon Musk Urged People to Stop Donating to Wikipedia. Here’s Why via Snopes. Fuck Elon. Counterpoint: you should start or continue donating to Wikipedia because it’s a huge repository of knowledge that individuals in many fields contribute to. It’s one of the last free internet places that hasn’t rotted in this era of the web.
Wading Into 2025: How to Begin via Organizing My Thoughts. I really liked this collection of several activists’ perspectives on things to think about heading into the new year.
Translation-adjacent via Words Without Borders. A few thoughts on all the work that translators do beyond the work of translating a text.
Never Forgive Them via Where’s Your Ed At. This is a long essay about how the internet sucks now and that a number of high-powered, rich people in tech chose to make it suck. They have made using the internet, something we all now need to function in society, hostile and adversarial and we’re all suffering from tiny psychic traumas every day because some people are obsessed with “growth” for their stupid companies. From the article, “Our digital lives are actively abusive and hostile, riddled with subtle and overt cons. Our apps are ever-changing, adapting not to our needs or conditions, but to the demands of investors and internal stakeholders that have reduced who we are and what we do to an ever-growing selection of manipulatable metrics. It isn’t that you don’t “get” tech, it’s that the tech you use every day is no longer built for you, and as a result feels a very specific kind of insane.”
TV and Music
You may not believe it but I saw two whole movies in the last two weeks. Lemon and I went to see Queer without knowing much about it other than gay, 1940s, set in Mexico. It ended up being a pretty fucking weird one because it’s based on a William S. Bourroughs novel. It’s a movie that’s uncomfortable on purpose, but knowing the discomfort is intentional doesn’t make it any better. Still, I did like the movie, especially with its anachronistic soundtrack and use of Jason Schwartzman as a bear.
Like everyone, I also saw Wicked, which I obviously liked. I read the books years ago and I have listened to the soundtrack but hadn’t seen the show, so it was nice to see it in movie form with super lush sets and costumes. I can’t believe they’re making it two movies though. But sure, why not. Maybe two movies will help people understand the concept of fascism.
The most fun album of the year appeared at the end of December: Best of Bootie 2024! It’s a collection of mashups featuring popular songs from this year and it is my preferred way of consuming most pop music.
Corporeal Form
cyborg hand
Kirk bought me a really nice gift to try to alleviate my carpal tunnel. It’s a hand massager that sort of looks like an Iron Man prop. I was a little skeptical but it actually feels quite nice. It seems like it’s helping but I have not yet tried to do any knitting. The massager recommends using it twice a day for 15 minutes, so I’ve been doing that for the last week, plus being a good citizen and doing my hand exercises. I’ve been spending an hour of my evenings watching TV, doing my hand stuff, drinking my electrolyes, and maybe doing some feet exercises while I sit there. I find this whole process kind of annoying but I’m trying to make it as enjoyable as possible. I am very tired of body maintenance but there isn’t really an alternative.
Kitchen Witchery
I tried a recipe for prebranac (Serbian baked beans) with my Christmas lima beans because I’m always trying to keep up with my bean subscription! I liked this recipe but the texture of stringy, cooked down onions is not my favorite (it’s fine but after a while I’m like, okay, I get it). I eventually decided pasta could fix this for me, so I mixed some of the leftover beans with noodles, topped that with gruyère and stuck it under the broiler. That was really good gave me some textural variety along with the onions.
I was so mad because I thought this orange tofu and broccoli was going to rule but I hated it! The sauce tasted really astringent to me. Kirk liked it though so that’s something. I liked the idea of the tofu and broccoli cooked together on the sheet pan so I am going to make this again but with a sauce from the store. That will be easier to make anyway.
Serbian baked beansserbian baked bean pastaOrange tofu and broccoli
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. Fritz has started hanging out on the couch again but only if he gets to be on the top, not on a cushion like a normal creature.
Well, friends and enemies, I have finished all the books I can hope to finish before we ring in the new year so it must be time for one of my favorite traditions: the annual year in books post. It felt like I spent a lot of time reading this year, but I guess it was just an average amount of time because I ended up reading around what I normally read: I finished 69 books and about 25,000 pages. I do wish that the publishing industry would take a year off and give me some time to catch up and that I could take a year off work and all life responsibilities to read every day and knock out my to-read pile. Alas, life marches on and I can’t spend all my time reading. I say this, but it’s clear I wouldn’t spent all my time reading anyway. I am split between a number of hobbies, which is great, but it means reading is just one of many and I can only do so much!
This year I made it a goal to read a little bit every single day, and I did! I’m currently on a 381-day streak, which I plan to continue in 2025. I also abandoned the goal of reading a certain number of books and decided to set a page number goal and try to focus on some longer books. And I did read some long ones this year!
I post about my reading because I like talking about what I read and I am proud of myself for engaging in art and for learning more about the world. I would like to think that I might inspire other people to read too! Even though I am deeply invested in my own metrics, I think reading any amount at all is a good thing. If you read one book a month, you are doing more than most!
Before I get to my stats and the full list, I have two things to promote. First: your local library! The best way to keep the library funded and relevant is by using it. I love checking out ebooks from the library but they have music, movies, video games, and even musical instruments and seeds. Second: Story Graph! I’ve been using it the last few years and really like it. It’s a very nice way to track your reading. It’s run by one woman who loves to read and I think that’s great. If you join Story Graph, you can follow me @linzomatic.
Reading Stats
Pages read: According to what I logged on Story Graph, I read 25,095 pages. This number includes books I haven’t finished yet. If I only count pages from books I finished, it’s 24,705 pages.
Longest book: Furious Heaven by Kate Elliott at 728 pages. This is book two in The Sun Chronicles. The longest non-fiction book was Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America by Pekka Hämäläinen at 576 pages. I only read 22 books that had fewer than 300 pages.
Shortest book: The Lights of Ystrac’s Wood by Alexandra Rowland, which is only 85 pages long.
Library use: I read 34 books from the library and 26 of those were ebooks. Thank you library for saving me literally hundreds of dollars every year.
First book: I finished Network Effect by Martha Wells on January 7.
Last book: I finished The City in Glass by Nghi Vo on December 31 (today!).
Fiction and non-fiction: Of the 69 books I read, one-third (23) were non-fiction, and the other two-thirds were fiction. I think my non-fiction reading increases a little year. I’m might become one of those old people who only reads non-fiction.
Most-read Authors: Alexandra Rowland with six(!) books, then Francis Spufford, Adrian Tchaikovsky, and Martha Wells with three books each.
Gender gap: I kept track of how many books I read by men compared to women this year, as I normally do, but I didn’t purposely focus too hard on reading books by women like I have done in years past. I read 22 books by men this year. That’s one of the highest shares of male authors since I started tracking. It feels excessive. I will be recommitting to reading more women in 2025.
Other languages: I read just two books in Spanish this year, but that’s better than zero! They were Chiapas, la rebelión indígena de México and El beso de la mujer araña.
I’m having a hard time naming many favorites this year. All the books I read are good, but they don’t all always form a new groove in my brain. The only favorites I immediately thought of were Alexandra Rowland’s books, which had me literally laughing out loud while reading. For the rest, I looked at what I rated five stars on Story Graph. I liked them a lot, I’m just not obsessed with them all! I’m not going to-rehash my thoughts on all of these books, search previous posts if you want to see what I thought about them.
Yield Under Great PersuasionIndigenous ContinentRunning Close to the WindCahokia JazzThe Adventures of Amina al-SirafiMoonboundSex with a Brain InjuryTranslating Myself and OthersYellowface by R. F. Kuang
The Books of 2024
Here is the 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
Network Effect
Martha Wells
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky
The Future
Naomi Alderman
Fugitive Telemetry
Martha Wells
Yellowface
R. F. Kuang
Sex with a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery
Annie Liontas
System Collapse
Martha Wells
Opinions: A Decade of Arguments, Criticism, and Minding Other People’s Business
Roxane Gay
The Adventures of Amina al-Sirafi
Shannon Chakraborty
Cheese Sex Death: A Bible for the Cheese Obsessed
Erika Kubick
A Secret History of Witches
Louisa Morgan
January Fifteenth
Rachel Swirsky
The Palestine Laboratory
Antony Loewenstein
Chiapas, la rebelión indígena de México
Carlos Montemayor
The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation
Cory Doctorow
The Book of Love
Kelly Link
Shards of Earth
Adrian Tchaikovsky
People Collide
Isle McElroy
Fathomfolk
Eliza Chan
Eyes of the Void
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Cahokia Jazz
Francis Spufford
Lords of Uncreation
Adrian Tchaikovsky
Chain Gang All-Stars
Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
The Magician’s Daughter
H. G. Parry
The Venture of Islam, Volume 1: The Classical Age of Islam
Marshall G. S. Hodgson
The Immortal King Rao
Vauhini Vara
Doppleganger: A Trip into the Mirror World
Naomi Klein
The Other Significant Others: Reimagining Life with Friendship at the Center
Rhaina Choen
Devil’s Gun
Cat Rambo
Unconquerable Sun
Kate Elliott
Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond Productivity Culture
Jenny Odell
Furious Heaven
Kate Elliott
Translating Myself and Others
Jhumpa Lahiri
Running Close to the Wind
Alexandra Rowland
A Taste of Gold and Iron
Alexandra Rowland
The Centre
Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi
The Ministry of Time
Kaliane Bradley
The End of Drum Time
Hanna Pylväinen
Tadek and the Princess
Alexandra Rowland
Hench
Nina Zine Walschots
El beso de la mujer araña
Manuel Puig
Moonbound
Robin Sloan
The Viral Underclass: The Human Toll When Inequality and Disease Collide
Steven W. Thrasher
Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America
Pekka Hämäläinen
Light Perpetual
Francis Spufford
Bunny
Mona Awad
Some by Virtue Fall
Alexandra Rowland
The Lights of Ystrac’s Wood
Alexandra Rowland
How Infrastructure Works
Deb Chachra
Vita Nostra
Sergey Dyachenko, Marina Dyachenko
Femina: A New History of the Middle Ages, Through the Women Written Out of It
Janina Ramírez
Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation
Kristin Kobes Du Mez
The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics
Olivia Waite
Assassin of Reality
Sergey Dyachenko, Marina Dyachenko
Yield under Great Persuasion
Alexandra Rowland
Swordcrossed
Freya Marske
Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism
Joanne Limburg
Dracula
Bram Stoker
Red Plenty
Francis Spufford
They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent
Sarah Kendzior
Sistersong
Lucy Holland
The Crime Without a Name: Combatting Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America
Barrett Holmes Pitner
The Teleportation Accident
Ned Beauman
Monsignor Quixote
Graham Green
No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need
Naomi Klein
Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay: The Case for Economic Disobedience and Debt Abolition
Debt Collective, Astra Taylor
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
Katherine May
The First Bright Thing
J. R. Dawson
The City in Glass
Nghi Vo
Cats and Books
It feels right to end this post with cats as I do with my other posts. I thought for sure I would have more pictures of cats with books from the year, but apparently not. It’s going to take time to get Fritz into the high-brow academic shit that Huey read with me.
Assassin of RealityShards of EarthManufacturing ConsentThe Ministry of TimeThe Internet Con
Hello, friends and enemies. Another year is coming to an end and the new year is once again upon us. I wrote quite a lot on the blog this year. WordPress keeps track for me, so I know that I published 32 posts consisting of about 79,000 words (not including this post). That’s basically a novel’s worth of words! I looked through the year’s posts and saw that I spilled a lot of ink on current events. I’m sure four voter guide posts (English and Spanish for the primaries and general election) added a notable chunk to the word count. I never set out to make this a blog about the wider world, but I am unfortunately cursed with a need to make my opinions public and, in the case of the voter guides, I am cursed by popular demand. I’m not trying to be an essayist, but it is starting to seem like the essay life may have chosen me. We are living in an era with plenty to discuss (derogatory). I am of course planning to continue writing next year and I like my every-other-week schedule; more frequently was too stressful and less frequently means the posts will feel way too long to write. Maybe I’ll get really wild and develop an essay collection. Who knows.
I am continuing the beloved tradition of creating an annual mood board. Here are the vibes going in to 2025. We are keeping it fabulous, reveling in the company of our loved ones, and raging. Life hard, but I’m harder.
2025 Mood Board
Books and Other Words
I will post my books of the year list (the 17th annual!) soon. When I do, I’ll add a link here.
One of my goals in 2024 was to read at least a page of a book every day. There were some days that I did literally read one page, just enough to keep the streak going all year! I’m on day 378 right now because I started in mid-December 2023. I’m really proud of this. I read a lot but in the past I’ve gone a few days in a row without touching a book because I’m tired or annoyed or whatever. Having the daily reading goal was helpful in getting me to stop scrolling and read, and it wasn’t annoying or stressful like I was worried it might be. I’m definitely planning to keep my reading streak going into 2025.
My new reading goal this year is to read more in Spanish. I’m not committing to every day but I am aiming for most days. I am going to set a lower reading goal (this year’s goal was 30,000 pages and I’m probably going to make it to around 25,000, so a lower goal is something like 20,000 words) to allow for being a slower reader in Spanish than English. I just want to get good and fluent and confident and I know the way to do this is read more. I’ve been testing this plan for the last week or two and it’s going well so far. I’m looking forward to seeing how it goes and how my Spanish feels after a year of focusing on reading.
Doing Stuff
I managed to do quite a lot of things this year! I feel like I’m always in my house (and I like it that way) but I do actually get out. In February I went to New Jersey to visit Lito and we spent a day in New York. I also visited my sister in southern California during the summer. We had season tickets to the Sacramento Ballet again this year, plus Abby and I saw a flamenco performance, and I went to see Vision Video in concert with Lemon. This year, Lemon and I revived a version of our cookbook club and hosted themed food parties like the souper bowl. So, I am doing a lot of things I want to do. I wish I could see my friends more but work and energy levels are limiting factors. Here’s to more cultural outings and friend visits in 2025.
we found the grailCinderella at the Sac BalletSac Ballet InnovationsVision Video (it’s very hard to get a good picture of people in motion in the dark)sistersSac Ballet Draculasoup tastingdumpling bonanzagotta try them all
Languages
It was definitely a big year for language studying. I got really into translating Wikipedia and I have no plans to stop. I reached 100 edits on English Wikipedia in March and I’m now over 700. It’s not all from translating—there’s a lot of copy editing too—but translating is the part I’m enjoying the most. I’ve been translating articles from Spanish to English without supervision and I am very proud of the articles I translated on LGBT literature in Argentina and Mexico, respectively. I translated some English articles into Spanish and Ana and I spent quite a long time on the 2000 Supreme Court case, Bush v. Gore article. In Icelandic, Robert and I worked through something like 60 short articles that I translated from Icelandic into English. The translation itself is a bit of work but I think I am getting at least as much practice from tracking down citations since Icelandic Wikipedia is impoverished in references ([heimild vantar] is [citation needed])! This stuff honestly brings me a lot of joy and feels really fun and satisfying to do. For next year, I want to keep working through translating some of the queer literature articles from Spanish to English. In Icelandic, I just want to finish my self-imposed quest of translating all the articles about the Skagafjörður region. Although I am sure once we finish, I’m going to pick a new region of Iceland. Hopefully by then I can do some of these on my own without help.
100 Wikipedia edits
Aside from the Wikipedia quest, I’m planning to read more in Spanish, as previously mentioned. Otherwise, I don’t think I’m going to set any very specific goals for my language learning. Letting myself be curious and get hyperfixated on Wikipedia has been fun and educational, so I’m going to let my whims dictate my learning process like I’m a kid in a Montessori school. It seems to be working for me.
Corporeal Form
I feel like this year I spent the most time just dealing with the physical tasks of existence and various health issues. I got diagnosed with fatty liver at the very end of last year, and this year had to talk to the doctor about it a lot and get a biopsy (my liver is not that bad, per the biopsy). This lead to working with a dietician and eventually learning that eating raw produce causes me stomach issues. I spent a month of my life feeling sick before figuring it out. I sprained my fucking ankle and it took months to heal. In fact, it seems that I’ve only recently gotten it back to being fully functional. I found out I am hypermobile and probably have dysautonomia of some form (these issues often appear together). My carpal tunnel started becoming a real issue. Oh, and I almost forgot that devil perimenopause. I got my first hot flash in May and my body temperature has been utterly whack all year. All this to say: I’m tired. Each of these problems requires some kind of adjustment or exercise or preventative thing. I end up reading up on everything myself because the doctors are not always very helpful or don’t connect multiple issues or want me to do something that is “good” for whatever condition but is bad for me specifically. It’s a lot. It’s taken a lot of my time this year and I don’t see this requiring any less of my time and effort in the future. It feels hard to have so much to manage at only 38 years old (but maybe it’s not and I’m just louder about it than other 38-year-olds?). This list isn’t even all of my ongoing health stuff, it’s just the issues that came up or escalated this year. We only get one life and one body, so I gotta work with it and make this one count.
In the coming year, I am going to try to adjust my outlook on my health and how I manage it. I think I have to treat it as almost like a hobby (or a part-time job, but I’d rather think of it as a hobby) in terms of time and knowledge and planning required to take care of everything. Doing my hand exercises and my ankle exercises, drinking my electrolytes, making sure I have food I can eat and that is what I need for my health, staying active but not getting so worn out from holding my body up that I can’t do anything the next day! I have to accept that this level of work is just how it is going to be for me and figure out how to spread it out so I can deal with everything and not feel like it’s preventing me from doing stuff I want to do. Taking care of myself is what enables me to do what I want! It’s just lot of work and I wish I could fecklessly go through life without worrying about this shit.
Knitting and Crafts
I was able to answer for myself the question of “Why aren’t I knitting?” Fucking carpal tunnel. My hand goes numb after about five minutes, which is not enough time to do much of anything. This year, I have almost knit one whole, very tiny shawl. I have been working hard on figuring out how to knit ergonomically and taking care of my carpal tunnel, so I am hoping I will be able to knit a little more in 2025.
The beginnings of the tiny shawl
Moving It
For 2024, I set myself the goal of learning to do a consistent pirouette in ballet and to lift weights twice a week. The ankle sprain situation really derailed me, but I think I did get a lot better at turning, even though I am not yet a master of the single pirouette. I did, however, improve my jazz turn a lot (it’s a little easier because it’s not turned out). I ended up with a few solo classes this year when other students didn’t show up, and I asked to work on turns every time. So, I got a lot of tips and perspective from different teachers. Perhaps in 2025 I will finally figure out the pirouette! As for lifting weights, I am just planning to get out and lift when I can. Once a week would be nice, but I know once it gets hot in the summer, I’m really at the mercy of the temperature. I was kind of beating myself up about not lifting much this year because I was thinking I’d wasted a bunch of money setting up a garage gym and barely using it. However, Kirk pointed out that it’s paid for itself because if I had been paying for a gym membership all this time, I’d have nothing to show for it. At least I have my own equipment and I can work out when the mood takes me and the energy is available.
Kitchen Witchery
Looking back through my posts and photos, I mostly made just regular food this year. I didn’t get into anything complex or fancy, but I did add some really good meals to my regular rotation like pasta e fagioli, peanut butter chicken, and corn and asparagus pasta with ricotta. I spent a lot of kitchen energy on figuring out how to implement my dietician’s suggestions. I’m trying to get more omega-3 through flax, more vegetables, more whole grains, and less red meat (not that I was eating so much, but still). I’m always torn with wanting to do the most in the kitchen because I find the process enjoyable versus wanting to do very little because I am increasingly tired with the act of bustling around for long periods of time. For 2025, I am going to keep working on figuring out how to enjoy cooking with the level of energy currently available to me. I am trying not to overcomplicate things and make sure I eat the stuff I’m supposed to eat. I also want to cook some fun stuff and try new breads and pastries and, of course, new bean recipes to keep up with my subscription.
Here are some of my favorites from this year.
turkey and dumplingsPasta e fagiolicorn and asparagus pasta with ricotta and some chickenslow-cooker peanut butter chickenperfect zucchini breadTriple chocolate olive oil browniesit’s always pizza timesheet pan noodles with tofu and broccolifrench onion baked lentils and farro (feat. bread)
Cat Therapy
It was very hard to lose Huey cat this year. Between losing her and her sister Viola a few years ago, it feels like an era of my life is gone. I adopted them in 2008 when I was still in college and I had them with me through some difficult years. Fortunately, Fritz is still with us and he seems to revel in being an only child. Huey and Viola live on in our hearts (and blog posts). I also got to see my feline nephews and niece this year, visiting my sister and her cat Neo, and Lito and his cats Riff and Maggie. We can only hope that 2025 brings more opportunities to pet all the cats.
Finally, here are some my favorite cat photos from the last year for your nerves.
Huey is a ladyhome and holding hands with HueyHuey in profileFritz, king of the bedRiff: a loverCat conferenceBig tiredNeo being longFritz catching the sun perfectly, as usualBro is ready to start declaiminggoofy-ass animalFritz being the cutest baby in existence
Hello, friends and enemies. I really considered not posting anything today, but you know I love to stay on a schedule, so I’ve womaned up and done the dang thing. The last two weeks have been surprisingly busy at work, which, unfortunately, makes it pretty much impossible for me to have energy to do other things (because autism is a disability!). Last week, I did a big certification for accessibility compliance, which is cool and good and important to my job, but it was time consuming. This week I unexpectedly had a bunch of work involving creating an formatting a 50-page form. It is part of my job to do things like this but FIFTY PAGES of form is my personal hell. Especially when I’m informed it needs to be done immediately and I end up working until nine at night! Hateful! Ebeneezer Scrooge-ass behavior! I am contracted to the federal government, so they’ve been freaking out this week under the treat of government shutdown and the impending regime change. It’s a whole thing. I’m hoping everyone will chill out this week and I can have energy to get caught up on the things I actually care about like my Wikipedia translations and my reading. I had planned to do way more reading this week but alas!
Current Events
In my last post, I wrote about the United Health Care CEO’s killing and how the police hadn’t identified a suspect. As anyone who is at all online knows, the police have since arrested Luigi Mangione and charged him with multiple crimes, including terrorism. Mangione has already fully converted into a folk hero and the jokes and discourse over the last two weeks have truly been a source of delight. However, I have to remind everyone (including myself) that we don’t know if he actually did this. We have to assume he is innocent until/if he is found guilty. There are many documented cases of police planting evidence on people. The police say that they found Luigi with a gun and a manifesto, but that doesn’t mean it’s real. It may be real, but we don’t know.
It’s insane to me that the killing of literally one man with no apparent threats to anyone else is considered terrorism. According to the K-12 School Shooting Database (the bleakest website name in human history), there have been 327 school shootings this year alone. Where are the terrorism charges for school shooters? Where are the terrorism charges for the NRA lobbyists who insist that we can’t have gun control? Where are the terrorism charges for congress, who is not doing anything to stop this problem? Or for congress again for sending $17.9 billion in military aid to Israel in a year to support their genocide? Is this not terrorism? Our country is obsessed with terrorism, but it’s only terrorism when it threatens the status quo or can be used to whip up the populace into a jingoistic frenzy and erode our freedoms (shout out to the Patriot Act and the Transportation and Security Administration). I don’t know anyone who feels terrorized by a CEO’s death. The mood on the ground is everyone shrugging and saying “good.” However, many people feel terrorized by violence in schools or other public places. A whole generation of children has grown up with the omnipresent treat of violence at school. This whole fucking country is terroristic, but sure, let’s charge one guy with terrorism. That will fix the problem (big sarcasm).
Whether or not Mangione killed the CEO is now totally irrelevant. He is now a symbol for standing up to class warfare. The last year in particular (and I guess the last 30 years in general, from Reagan and neo-liberalism onward) has really worn people in this country down. Groceries are fucking expensive. Medical debt is a leading cause of bankruptcy (the United States is not quite the only country with this problem, but we’re the only one having it on such a large scale). Productivity continues to outpace wages and the federal minimum wage has been $7.25/hour since 2009 and it’s impossible for most people to afford their rent. Meanwhile, the US is spending more on its military than the next nine countries combined, and the top ten richest guys in the world doubled their wealth during the pandemic. This is our money. All of these funds should be paying for society but instead we’re funneling it to a handful of rich assholes and the world’s biggest war machine. This is a sustainable way to run a society. Whether or not Luigi did it, can we be surprised if, under these conditions, he is the spark that burns the whole place down?
Books and Other Words
Can’t Pay Won’t Pay
Can’t Pay Won’t Pay by the Debt Collective is a treatise exploring why we should stop paying our bills. Specifically, the Debt Collective calls for debtors to unionize and stop paying off exploitative debts like student loans and medical debt. It’s a form of collective action that “fights against predatory financial contracts and for the universal provision of public goods, including healthcare, education, housing, and retirement.” The argument is that our society has privatized things that should be public, which is part of why we’re all broke and in debt. One way to fight back would be to just … stop paying. The Collective suggests that people who owe the same creditors can form unions together. While an individual is, so to speak, owned by the bank, many individuals can bring any given bank or creditor to their knees. It may sound radical but consider that this idea was basically seen as a joke just ten years ago, yet we did see Biden attempt to pardon some student debt, a reminder that activism is a long game. The authors point out that forming a collective of debtors isn’t that radical; the “creditors are already organized—that’s why they got bailed out in 2008 and 2020.” The book also goes into a brief history of debt and privatization in the US. One painful example is that tuition at the University of California used to be totally free, but Reagan (when he was our governor), pushed for charging. This is generally seen as a response to Black people in particular and people of color in general seeking higher education. Reagan and racism strike again! The Debt Collective reminds us that bankers are profiting from our debts while the average American dies thousands of dollars in debt. It doesn’t make sense and people are suffering, which is why we need a radical change in how we approach financing public goods.
Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
I read Katherine May’s Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times because I kept seeing people online rave about how transformative it is. I did like the book and thought the writing itself was lovely, but the idea that sometimes we just have to rest is not particularly new to me. I’ve already engaged with this concept through books like How to Do Nothing, so while I agree with this book’s concept, it didn’t bring about a major paradigm shift for me. What actually stuck out most to me in this book is that this a chronicle of a highly masked autistic woman who reaches a breaking point. I’m not giving May an armchair diagnosis by the way—she mentions early in the book that she was undiagnosed growing up. That really framed this whole book for me. She is beset by a mysterious illness that is forcing her to rest and take it easy and not go to work as a university professor. Yeah, girl, it’s probably the autism! Being a teacher is a high-masking gig and it will take a toll. She says that, when she had to begin “wintering” herself, “I couldn’t do as much as I’d hoped. I couldn’t be the person I’d imagined: cheerful, energetic, summery. I struggled.” A few paragraphs later, she says she saw this episode coming and, in anticipation, “I began to treat myself like a favoured child: with kindness and love … I assumed my needs were reasonable and that my feelings were signals of something important.” Baby, that is autistic burnout!! Thinking of periods of burnout like this sounds like it’s helpful for the author, but I wonder if she would be better served by recognizing that she has a whole-ass disability and her needs are reasonable even during her personal summers so the winter doesn’t hit her like a ton of bricks.
Last Sunday, my friend Lemon and I had a holiday cookie party to finish out this year’s series of food-themed gatherings. We asked everyone to bring a cookie and Lemon and I made some actual food so we didn’t go into a sugar coma. I made this lentil baked ziti recipe, which was really good (though I did add more ricotta than the recipe called for and extra seasonings). For treats, I brought some extra-Christmassy rice krispie treats and toffee (not pictured). Everyone made great cookies and it was fun to hang out. I also have to point out that I finally wore one of the things I knitted a couple of years ago. For whatever reason, this sweater vest had never made it into an actual outfit before, so here it is.
real food so we can eat lots of cookiesmost festive rice krispie treats of all timegotta try them allfit check
Kitchen Witchery
I’ve managed to make some normal food among all the treats. We enjoyed this butternut squash and caramelized onion galette with some red beans and rice (recipe from The Bean Book). I also tried this NYT Cooking recipe for cheesy chili crisp white beans (because NYT is obsessed with cheesy, beany things right now, but I’m not mad). I ate it for lunch for a few days and I enjoyed it. Although I think it’s more of an idea than something that really needs a recipe. It’s just beans and seasoning with cheese on top! I tried making a new treat, this salted maple honeycomb. It’s very good but super crumbly! I think I am going to embrace the crumblies and put it on top of ice cream. I also returned to everyone’s favorite treat, million peso shortbread, based on this recipe. I finally realized that I have to slice it before the chocolate is hard and fully set so that I can get it into nice squares instead of random shards. Not sure why it took me so long to figure that out, but we’re here now.
caramelized onion and butternut squash galettered beans and rice and butternut squash galetteugly but effective cheesy beanshoneycomb!million peso shortbread
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves. It’s been cold so Fritz has been in my biz. The results are very cute.
Hello, friends and enemies. I don’t have any opening thoughts today. Let’s get into it.
Current Events
This week, as presumably everyone already knows, the CEO of United Healthcare was assassinated in New York City. The mood on the internet is probably as festive as when those billionaires died on that stupid submarine last summer. I understand that it’s gauche to cheer someone’s death. What I don’t get is why some people are clutching their pearls over this when United Healthcare is certainly killing people every day by denying claims “with a rate nearly double the industry average.” They’re currently the subject of a lawsuit for using an AI model to approve claims, “Though few patients appeal coverage denials generally, when UnitedHealth members appeal denials … over 90 percent of the denials are reversed, the lawsuit claims. This makes it obvious that the algorithm is wrongly denying coverage, it argues.” I’m not rooting for anyone to die, but the people at the top of our system seem like they are, on some level, rooting for our demise, even if they might not think about it in a tangible way. They make money denying claims, providing shitty health coverage, and generally making it difficult to fucking live. So, it doesn’t surprise me that all types of working-class people are feeling a little cheerful right now. It has felt like things might never change and we’re all stuck here being ground down day in and day out. Seeing that a CEO who gets millions of dollars every year while providing terrible healthcare die, well … sorry, but I can’t be upset.
What’s also wild is this has clearly spooked the executive class, which is to say, it worked. A man offed a single healthcare CEO and now, as 404 Media reports, “United Healthcare removed a page from its website listing the rest of its executive leadership, and several other health insurance companies have done the same, hiding the names and photos of their executives from easy public access.” There was also a Wikipedia debate about deleting the article for CVS’s current CEO, which spawned many conspiracy theories due to the timing of the proposal (they decided to keep the article). The best part is that this event actually shifted at least one policy. The same day at the killing, Anthem Blue Cross had announced it was going to “limit the amount of time it would cover anesthesia used in surgeries and procedures.” However, the next day, the company stated “it would no longer move forward with the policy change.” Yeah, I fucking bet.
Here are some memes for posterity. I don’t know what weird setting here is making the edges of the pictures blurry, but you can click on any of them to see the full thing.
Wealth distribution comparisonThe world is healingplay the hand you’re dealtassemble!the boycott!
Books and Other Words
The Teleportation Accident
I almost quit reading Ned Beauman’s The Teleportation Accident but ultimately persevered. I will admit that I didn’t know much about the book going into it but the title suggests science fiction and the cover art suggests jazz age, so I thought it would be a good time. However, there is no actual teleportation in this story, and the titular accident refers to a piece of epic stagecraft used in 17th century Venice that blew a giant hole in a theater and killed two dozen people. The story focuses on Egon Loeser, a man who is the 1930s equivalent of an incel. He lives in Berlin in 1930, works as a set designer, is always trying to find a party with good cocaine, refuses to read the news or engage in politics, and is obsessed with the fact that he’s not getting laid. I am sure this character is unsympathetic on purpose but, holy shit, is this guy deeply fucking unsympathetic. The plot kind of just happens to Loeser and he complains the whole time and is an asshole to everyone, including people who are apparently his friends. He becomes abruptly obsessed with a pretty girl and follows her to Paris and then Los Angeles, where he ends up living for almost a decade before finally crossing her path again. She’s not even into him! I get appreciating an anti-hero and I’m sure there’s some political commentary available to us about people who are indifferent to politics in times of serious political upheaval, but this was simply not the book for me here in the year of our lord 2024.
Monsignor Quixote
My friend Lito invited me to a sort-of public book club read of Monsignor Quixote by Graham Greene, which is not a book I would have picked up myself but I did appreciate it. The story is a modern (“modern” as in 20th century) take on Don Quijote and features a road trip with Father Quixote (who becomes elevated to a monsignor at the beginning of the story) and his friend, the staunch communist and former town mayor “Sancho.” It’s a philosophical novel with a lot of wine (and drunk driving!). I get Father Quixote because he is trying really hard to do what he thinks is right according to his religion. However, what seems morally correct to him does not always align with what the Catholic church thinks is right and he runs afoul of his bishop. There’s definitely a way to read this book in which Quixote is autistic and doesn’t get why everyone thinks he’s acting super weird. He’s living in his own world and not hurting anyone! Let him be! One thing I did find annoying about this book is that the communist former mayor, who is also an atheist, is often portrayed as having as much faith as Father Quixote. It does not take faith to be an atheist. But, I suppose Father Quixote (and Greene) is projecting. Quixote struggles with his belief, so he assumes that it must also require an act of faith to have no god. In any case, there is a fair amount of madcap antics amid the philosophical discussions that make the story fairly amusing even if you don’t want to think too hard about Catholicism and communism.
No Is Not Enough
Naomi Klein’s No Is Not Enough: Resisting Trump’s Shock Politics and Winning the World We Need was published in 2017, right after Trump became president the first time (I hoped I would never need to refer to Trump’s “first” term, but alas). The thesis of the book is, as the title suggests, that we can’t just say no to Trump and what he represents, we need to create a vision of the future we want and start fighting for that. Activists have spent years saying no to climate change and a dozen other crises, but all these issues are connected, and part of the work of activism is to provide a compelling alternative so that people believe and invest in the cause. Klein begins with explaining the multi-crisis we’re living through via the lens of her previous works, considering Trump as an entity of pure branding and describing how capitalists seize on disaster to make our lives worse while they profit. She goes on to talk about her work in drafting the Leap Manifesto, a foundational document of a group of Canadian activists who are pushing for radical change. Reading this book was a little funny at times because it referenced the early Trump era. I realized that I had already forgotten about so much of the stupid shit we lived through; his administration was constant mania. The book also felt like foreshadowing at times, like with the mention of Linda McMahon, who led the Small Business Administration under Trump, and who is returning for this season of Trumpism to play the secretary of education. It seems like these people come from nowhere but they were, in fact, already here. This is a very good book for anyone looking to ground themselves for a second term (ugh) of Trump or wanting to go beyond mere resistance.
Meanwhile, on the internet:
Must-Reads and Some Ways to Support Native People This Weekend via Organizing My Thoughts. I think it’s important that those of us who can afford it provide monetary support to Native people and causes, especially at this time of year, do so. This newsletter has some great suggestions for organizations to support.
Everyone’s a theater kid now via Garbage Day. It used to take a lot more effort to be a theater kid. Now, it’s easier to access the arts but harder to engage with them. “One of the bizarre side effects of our streaming- and platform-driven digital media environment is that, even though your favorite TV shows and movies have never been so accessible, audiences are also more likely to not actually experience them in full … Algorithmic social platforms like Facebook and X have been suppressing outgoing links for years, prioritizing the conversation about a thing over actually going and seeing the thing.”
I got a new phone, which was rather overdue since I kept accidentally abusing my old phone and it was getting very slow (it should not take ten or more seconds to open the camera. The cat has already moved!). I love the new phone because it has a stylus built in (it’s a Moto G stylus)! I also got a pop socket that looks like a composition book cover, so that brings me joy.
Since I’ve grown my hair out, I’ve been struggling with major tangling after I wash it and it’s been making me insane and literally snapping combs in half. I finally figured out that they make combs specifically for detangling wet hair. I’ve only been using it for a few days but it’s been a marked life improvement. No more tanglies! Let me live my life in peace!
Moving It
My dance recital was yesterday! It was a lot of fun as always. I do appreciate opportunities to be on stage, even if the audience is mostly parents of the kids who are dancing—I’m not picky though. I don’t have any photos because I was busy! I just want to let everyone know that I’m having a good time. If you missed it, you missed out, but you’ll have another chance to see me at the next recital in May.
Kitchen Witchery
It was Thanksgiving last week! It seems like a month ago already. My dad and sister came to visit for the day, which was very nice. I went all out and made a big turkey, plus all my usual sides. One new dish was a bean and fennel gratin from The Bean Book. This may shock you, but I didn’t like it. It had too many bits of things in with all the fennel and leeks. However, everyone else said it was good. I also made a hibiscus-ginger punch, which was really tasty. Since I’m banned from alcohol on account of my fatty liver, we have to find something else interesting to drink on special occasions, and this was a great choice. After Thanksgiving, I made some turkey broth and used the leftover meat into turkey and dumplings, which tasted amazing. It’s a recipe I’ve made before, but Kirk was like “I don’t know what you did to make it so good.” I don’t either but my guess is it was the whole head of garlic in the broth!
Hello, friends and enemies. I’ve been seeing a lot online lately about the importance of building community. I always feel like I’m doing it wrong because this advice always includes “talk to your neighbors!” Sorry, but that’s not who I am as a person. I’m not talking to the neighbors. I’ve wondered if that means community is something I can’t do or am doing incorrectly. However, I read something this week that made me think maybe I’m already contributing to building community with my blog. It sparks conversations with people and I’ve had some people tell me it inspired them to action. I’m sharing what I learn from the books I read (and maybe encouraging others to read and learn more?) and other tidbits from my online travels and maybe that is a way of doing community. When people say we need community now more than ever I think I’m supposed to be, like, … outside? I don’t know. I’m not trying to absolve myself from doing the work, but I am realizing the work I already do may be accomplishing more than I think. I’m sure I’ll be thinking and writing about this more as time goes on.
Another question I’ve been rotating in my mind this week is what brings me joy. Inspired by Lito asking our group chat what we think the difference is between “joy” and “delight,” and when do we feel those things, I spent some time mulling this over. It is often quite difficult for me to explain emotions and what causes them (I recall when I was getting evaluated for autism and the psychologist asked me to explain “happiness” and I just cried because I couldn’t but I didn’t want her to think I was never happy), so it was a bit of a challenge. I liked what I came eventually came up with so I decided to share it publicly here. Delight seems to me a subset of joy. Delight is fleeting and its arrival is often a surprise. Joy happens when I am doing things that align with how I see myself as a person (or the kind of person I want to be) and what’s important to me. I feel joy doing my Wikipedia editing and translating and I am delighted when I phrase a bit of translation in a way that sits just right. I feel joy riding my bike to the library and delighted when I find something cool on the nee books shelf. Joy is cuddling my cat (or other people’s cats) and delight is when he comes up to me and goes mrrrp. Joy is quality time with my logical family in the real or online in our various chats. Delight is the unexpected group chat callback or in-joke. It’s so important that we cultivate joy now (and always). It feels, once again, like the world is ending, but I’m a firm believer in the idea that life is what you make it. So many things suck. You can go along with that and let everything in your life suck too or rage against the dying of the light and wrest some joy from this would-be wretched existence. In conclusion:
Side note: Did you know that you can subscribe to my blog and get every post delivered to your inbox? Click the Subscribe tab on the top-right corner or click here. You can save yourself the trouble of checking your medium of choice to find out if I’ve posted. You can also reply to the emails if you want to tell me something! Yes, it does come back to me and not into some void.
Books and Other Words
I pre-ordered Sarah Kendzior’s They Knew: How a Culture of Conspiracy Keeps America Complacent before it was published in 2022, but only just got around to reading it (draw your own conclusions about why). The theme of Kendzior’s work as a whole is that people in power are failing us and the history of their misdeeds is in the public domain for anyone who cares to look. Unfortunately, assembling this sort of information tends to get you labeled a conspiracy theorist. However, these issues “are not conspiracy theories. These are conspiracy facts.” It is true both that people in power can and do conspire and our culture is rife with conspiracy theories because “of course people will flock to conspiracy theories when nearly every powerful actor is lying, obfuscating, or profiteering off pain” (emphasis in the original). Kendzior has been chronicling the “transnational crime syndicate masquerading as a government” for years and uses They Knew to link together some of the overarching problems that many of our country’s elite are wrapped up in, like Trump and his ties to the Russian oligarchs, or apparently everyone’s connections to the late Jeffrey Epstein. She bemoans the tendency on both the left and the right to wait to be rescued—in recent years, by the mysterious “Q” for MAGA adherents or Mueller for liberals—thanks to “the belief that somehow everything will work out on its own, because we could not have possibly gotten to a place where so many severe cataclysms intersect and feed off each other at once.” Kendzior is giving us permission to not trust the government. It’s not a conspiracy theory to point out that the government, especially on the federal level, is not often acting in the best interests of regular people. We have to talk about these issues. We can’t deal with these problems without discussing them. We deserve a government that actually cares about us and we have to acknowledge that there are real and deep-seated problems with our current leadership before we can move on.
Sistersong by Lucy Holland is set in the British kingdom of Dunmonia—I looked it up and this was a real place!—sometime between when the Romans abandoned Britain and the Normans invaded it. The story focuses on and is told through the perspectives of three sisters, the king’s daughters, who are grappling with the expectations of coming of age and with their diminishing magical abilities. The story finds the Dunmonian people at a crossroads; they have welcomed a Christian priest into their midst and the old ways of the Celtic religion are falling away, but abandoning the old ways is causing them to lose their connection to the land and their magic. I like this story a lot but it did take some dark turns, so be warned. It’s great for people who like books about sisters, exploring one’s queerness, or historical fiction/historical fantasy.
I think Barret Holmes Pitner’s The Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America might have rewired my brain. The book’s thesis is that we need a name for the concept of “[destroying] a people’s culture while keeping the people,” and that word, a sister to genocide, is ethnocide. This word makes it possible to describe, for example, what this country did to Black people through the Atlantic slave trade and chattel slavery. Black people remain, but their original cultures are lost. This book goes extremely hard on American culture. Just look at this: “American ethnocide represents an inversion of culture so severe that one must question if American society even has a culture.” Pitner continues with “American culture was never a collective culture focused on existence, but a divided culture that valued money more than human life.” This book helped me better understand an idea I have long held to be true: that white people in the US abdicated their history and culture to become homogeneously “white” rather than Italian, Polish, French, Danish, etc. White people perpetrated ethnocide on Black people and then turned around and did it to themselves to maintain power, which has left many people feeling lonely, with a void where their culture ought to be. Whiteness, per Pitner, is about essence over existence, that is, maintaining the idea of whiteness is more important than valuing human life. Look at how mad white culture gets when there is property damage, or how we refer to people as “consumers” rather than “citizens.” Our definition of freedom in this country is the freedom to own things (or, at certain points in history, to own people). Pitner also draws from a variety of other traditions and languages to find ways to describe his ideas and give us the vocabulary to understand them, pulling from existentialism and referencing Camus and Beckett, meditating on the German idea of the soul Geist, and defining a certain kind of vulgarity with the Russian word poshlyi. This book gave me so much to think about and I really appreciated every word. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants a deeper understanding of American culture and how we can begin to heal it.
They KnewSistersongThe Crime Without a Name: Ethnocide and the Erasure of Culture in America
Meanwhile, on the internet:
Controversial Prop. 65 warning labels about toxic chemicals are effective, study says via the LA Times. You know those warning labels that say something contains “chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects”? They’re actually helping us. From the article, “Now, a new study published in Environmental Health Perspectives has concluded that Proposition 65 has curbed exposure to toxic substances in California — and nationally.”
So What Does That Mean in Practice? via How Things Work. Democrats need to stop focusing on superficial things like slogans and actually do something to improve people’s lives if they ever want to win an election.
Interdependence is a Survival Skill, But Shouldn’t Feel Like Building a Bunker via Group Hug! I liked these thoughts on community building, especially this: “Community isn’t just about trying hard enough; it’s about what we are willing to feel.” The author mentions that right now many people are talking about building community like they would make a New Year’s resolution, but that is not going to work in the long term. The author offers some good questions to reflect on as we continue the work of connecting with others.
Maximizing Time for Reading via Dividual. Some thoughts on how and why to read more. One bit I liked from the article: “In general, aiming to ‘understand’ or even have concrete takeaways for what you read is getting the cart before the horse. Again, no one wakes up reading Pynchon and converting it to gold; that’s not the point. The point, if there is one, as with looking at a painting, is that you are exposing your mind to being nourished without needing to define it another way. Too often we try to read with purpose, as if everything we do must have a takeaway; instead, letting the words wash over you, taking what you take from them, and carrying forward tends for me to be a much more effective way of being ‘in’ the book, letting the soul of the book into my consciousness.”
One of my favorite new shows right now is Gastronauts on Dropout. It’s a cooking show but a goofy one. Three comedians set off-the-wall cooking challenges for chefs who have 30 minutes to carry them out. The stakes are basically non-existent. Everyone is funny and the food challenges are delightful. In the latest episode, someone asked for food that they could wear as a hat. I mean, so silly. So great. If you’re curious, the first episode is on youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYj9Wso2Tbc
Moving It
My next dance recital is coming up on December 7! If you are reading this, you are invited. You can get a ticket here: https://www.etix.com/ticket/o/10638/galaxydancearts. I’ll be performing in tap, jazz, and ballet as usual. There will also be adorable small children and some highly talented older children to watch!
Kitchen Witchery
Most of my kitchen efforts have been in service of Thanksgiving preparation (don’t sleep on using the freezer!) but I have made a few things of note. I made lasagna based on the recipe in How to Cook Everything. I normally make the “American-style” version, which has lots of ricotta and mozzarella, but this time I tried the traditional version with bechamel. It was good! Both versions are good for different reasons and it’s nice to have options. I also made this handsome cocoa-yogurt cake from Snacking Cakes. Honestly, a rainbow sprinkle makes everything more festive.
lasagna for dinnercocoa yogurt bundt cake
Cat Therapy
Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.
Hello, friends and enemies. Please allow me to start with something completely trivial today before we get into the heavy stuff: it makes me crazy when people get mad about the fall time change. “It’s dark by the time work is over!” they cry. “I hate it!” they exclaim. The problem is not the end of daylight saving time. The problem is the Earth’s axis. Winter has less light, no matter how you distribute it. The other problem is capitalism. Unfortunately, we are all expected to maintain the same working pace in the winter when we should clearly be doing only a little work and being cozy at home the rest of the day. Shifting the time an hour isn’t the cause of your woes. Get a grip. Start a revolution or something.
With everything else, I almost forgot that it was Halloween just a week ago. We actually got a few trick-or-treaters this year! Not a lot, mind you, but just enough to justify buying candy and avoid Kirk clowning me for buying a bunch of candy that we didn’t give out (which is what happened last year). I tried turning on some string lights in one of our front windows to emphasize that we are home and handing out treats and maybe that helped. It was also suggested to me that having non-participating Jehovah’s Witnesses as our neighbors on one side might be discouraging people from bothering with the houses in our immediate area, which is a bummer if true.
On with the show.
Current Events
Current events is becoming a permanent feature, I fear. I would rather not spend my energies on this shit but, alas, we play the hand we’re dealt. I have things to say about it all, god help me. The next paragraph is a bit graphic, so skip to the one after if you don’t want to hear about body things.
My period began the day before the election and, thanks to perimenopause, it’s become very heavy. When I woke up on election day, I had bled through my tampon and stained the sheets. There was blood dripping down my legs by the time I made it to the bathroom. I’m not sharing this because I think it’s horrific—on the contrary, women are very familiar with their own blood—but because that morning I watched blood droplets pool on the floor and thought, I hope this is mere coincidence and not an omen. I don’t truly believe in omens; I believe in the chaos and randomness of the universe. Yet, the pull to narrativize this kind of image is so strong. It does feel like it means something that I woke up covered in blood on the day this country elected Trump a second time. It’s hard not to feel like my body was communicating a dire warning.
I’m sure the whole world knows already that Donald Trump won the election. I thought for sure it would be like 2016 where he only won because of the electoral college, or maybe it would be like 2000 and he would win because of the Supreme Court with a little help from the three justices he installed for just this purpose. But no, he won the old-fashioned way with a plurality of the popular vote. Trump received 72.76 million votes to Harris’s 68.09 million (note that millions of eligible Americans do not vote at all). I find it interesting that both the Democrats and Republicans received fewer votes overall than they did in 2020, when Trump lost with 74.22 million votes and Biden won with 81.28 million votes. I’m far from the first person to point this out but I feel it’s an important part of this election’s story. This means 15 million fewer people voted this year election than in 2020. If everyone who voted for Biden showed up to vote for Harris this time, she would have won handily, but they didn’t. Why not? We are about to be subject to months (or years) of pontificating on this subject—including my own (haha)!
In my opinion, several big, interlocking issues made Harris lose to Trump. America remains sexist and racist. Voters do not want to vote for a woman (see: 2016 and, I suppose, all of US history), let alone a Black/Indian woman. Let us not forget that Obama is half-white, which I really think made him more palatable for some voters. The other issue is that Harris and her campaign made weird and bad choices. She started off fun with Brat summer but her campaign website (that’s an archive.org link to the pre-election-day version) was vague on many issues. It says, for just one example, that she planned to “protect Social Security and Medicare,” but didn’t offer any vision for how to improve on what we already have. I get that, running against Trump, the important message is that government matters and we’re not going to let this asshole tear everything apart. But you have to go a step beyond and say government matters and here’s what we’re going to do to strengthen it and make everyone’s lives better. She didn’t do that. She also never translated her website into Spanish and I think that’s criminally negligent! The Biden administration should have done more to resolve the issues that brought Trump to power the first time and Trump should have faced some actual consequences for inciting a fucking attempted coup in 2021. When people see the government acting like it’s business as usual, they assume there isn’t a real or serious problem, which translated into a lot of people wrongly thinking there’s nothing wrong with voting for Trump because it’s just another election.
I also blame Democrats’ propensity to pander to an imagined base of Republican-leaning centerists who will vote Democrat and save the day. Somehow. Allegedly. Why did Harris campaign with Liz Cheney? Who is that for? This alienates the people who are supposed to be the actual Democratic base. If people want to vote for a Republican, that option is available. Why would they vote for Kamala Harris, neoliberal, diet-Republican? I believe Harris would have won if she had campaigned hard on things people actually want like embargoing weapons sales to Israel. The Intercept reports that “a June poll from CBS … showed 61 percent of all Americans said the U.S. should not send weapons to Israel, including 77 percent of Democrats and nearly 40 percent of Republicans” For all the rhetoric about a “divided” nation, we sure seem to agree on not sending weapons to Israel! Additionally, Congresswoman Rashida Talib, a Palestinian-American and critic of the Biden administration’s support of Israel, won her reelection with a two-thirds majority. Other progressive issues won throughout the country, too. Missouri and other states voted to end their abortion bans. People show up when you give them something worth showing up for. The Democrats didn’t give us anything to root for. They’ve been beating us with the “Republicans will repeal Roe v. Wade” stick for the last 15 years and, guess what, they finally did that and Democrats have not been able to save us. We save us. Missouri and other states did it. So, I don’t think any particular minority demographic is to blame and I don’t believe third-party voters are to blame either because their votes were less than the vote differential between Harris and Trump. We need a party that is going to do what people want! The Democrats are ignoring our phone calls and telling people to shut up when they bring up the genocide Israel is carrying out in Gaza. Why would we get excited about voting for her? The Democratic establishment did this to themselves.
Here in California, we had some important things on the ballot (here’s the summary of results from the L.A. Times). We passed propositions 2, 3 and 4, to fund schools, legally confirm that marriage doesn’t need to be heterosexual, and allow the state to issue bonds and spend money on climate-resilliancy projects. That’s all good stuff. I am disappointed that we did not vote to raise minimum wage or end rent control, however I am not surprised about the rent control one because we keep having opportunities to vote for it and landlords keep spending millions to convince us we shouldn’t do it. I am genuinely upset that we did not vote to end slavery for people in prison. We also voted to lower the threshold for felonies, which will no doubt put more people in our overcrowded prisons to do forced labor. As I wrote in my voter guide:
It’s hard not to see forced, low-wage prison labor as a way for corporations to evade hiring non-incarcerated workers and paying them a normal wage. At the risk of sounding like a conspiracy theorist, I must point out the Supreme Court ruling from earlier this year that effectively criminalized homelessness. It seems like an excuse to put homeless people in prison and make them work instead of finding ways to make housing more accessible.
It’s especially troubling that Californians affirmed support for the prison-industrial complex on the eve of Trump’s ascension. He has long threatened to jail political enemies (and I don’t love how loosely that may eventually be defined) and there is no reason to think he won’t do this. Private prison companies are certainly ecstatic over a second Trump term. Geo Group, which has over 100 facilities, saw it’s stock price rise by 32 percent after the election was called for Trump. Isn’t it bleak that we live in a world not only with private prisons, but with publicly traded private prisons? These decisions may haunt us in the years to come.
All that said, I wanted to address the issue of what we might do about it all. I think it’s going to get pretty bad. If Trump’s administration does even a quarter of the shit in Project 2025, things will be rough for us. I am personally worried that I may eventually lose my job because it depends on the Affordable Care Act and I’m indirectly contracted to the federal government. Lots of people are worried about lots of things and although my job is certainly not the most serious potential problem, it’s personal and important to me. Here are some things I’m thinking about as a form of disaster preparedness, if you will.
Post-election thought from Chuck Tingle
Find joy in this life. Do not preemptively cede your joy to this political moment. Doing things for yourself that make you happy, spending time with your friends and family, engaging in hobbies, and doing things just for fun are all important. Joy is radical. Try not to give up things you like in advance. Loving yourself and enjoying life is a protest. Don’t let this grind you down any more than you must.
I know I sound like an old woman who lived through the depression when I say things like this, but stock your pantry, have backups of any important things you need to live (for me, CPAP parts), and order your medication refills as early as you can so you can have a little buffer. I think we are in for supply chain chaos and Trump’s tariffs are going to make things a lot more expensive. The best defense against inflation is a full pantry. Kirk and I are strategizing about any big house-related purchases we may need to make before Trump gets into office and starts ripping us off. I think if you can afford to do so, make sure you have a little extra of whatever you normally use on hand, it will alleviate some difficulty. I will never forget how insane people went with hoarding toilet paper during the pandemic in 2020 and I am adjusting my purchasing habits accordingly.
Pick one cause to put your effort into. There will be many things that need attention (I mean, there already are!) in the coming years. Pick one thing in your community that you want to support and volunteer for that. If you can, pick some organizations to support with a monthly donation too. I personally donate to the Elk Grove Food Bank, NorCal Resist, and Women’s Health Specialists (and the Wikimedia Foundation, but that’s not local). I am looking into volunteering for the Sacramento Public Library because that’s something important to me and a volunteer gig that I think I could manage.
Read, read, read as much as you can. Learn about how we got here, how other people have dealt with these times in history, and to figure out how we get to the other side of this. Read fiction to escape from this reality for a while. Go to the library! Build your personal book collection that does not depend on services like Kindle Unlimited (Amazon can cut you off anytime)! Share books and magazines with your friends! We have to educate ourselves because no one is going to do it for us. I get a lot of good political non-fiction from Haymarket Books (and they often have ebook sales so you can get them for cheap. They have ebooks on sale for $2 right now) and AK Press has some free ebooks available right now. I also highly recommend Sarah Kendzior’s newsletter and books (Hiding in Plain Sight and They Knew are important works). She’s an expert on authoritarianism and the only person who has correctly predicted all of the garbage we’re dealing with because authoritarians always follow the same script. These people suck and they are not creative.
Don’t over-rely on the internet and digital world. Websites can easily disappear. Cloud services can be shut down. If you need information, save it to your computer or archive it somehow. You may have noticed I am using some archive.org links in this post instead of linking directly to news stories. This probably sounds alarmist, but who knows if that information will stay online! The internet isn’t as permanent as it seems. Download an archive of your facebook account so you have all your photos in a place that isn’t just facebook. Don’t exclusively rely on the cloud (which is just other computers, by the way). Also, it’s getting harder to navigate a lot of digital spaces and trust the information there because of AI (note that facebook is actively pushing AI content). Figure out which sources you can trust and don’t believe everything you read online, especially if it’s something that gets a big emotional reaction from you.
Related to the previous bullet: connect with people offline. We are halfway to a surveillance state already and god only knows how much worse it’s going to get. Don’t hold all your conversations through facebook messenger or instagram. Talk to people in the real world or use a private, encrypted messaging service like Signal. Hang out with your friends in real life! Eat snacks outside and feel the breeze.
Let me just say: I hope I’m wrong. I hope all the “it won’t be that bad” people are right and that you fill up your pantry for no good reason. I would love to be wrong about all this. However, I don’t think I will be. Experts in history, politics, and authoritarianism are super worried right now. There are many ways for things to go badly and very few pathways of minimal suffering. I’ll end on this: I was looking for something in an old post and found that I love saying “I would love to be wrong,” which I noted in my post after the Court overturned Roe v. Wade (by the way there are some good suggestions in that post too, if you’re looking for something to do about everything). Unfortunately, I wasnot wrong.
Books and Other Words
I read Bram Stoker’s Dracula for the first time (although I did attempt to read it via Dracula Daily last year, but discovered that I don’t like reading books incrementally in my email inbox) in anticipation of seeing the Sacramento Ballet perform it. It’s interesting to read something that has taken on such a life of its own in pop culture. I thought I knew the story but it turned out I didn’t know much at all, just the sense of Dracula is a character. I’m not going to recap a 100-year-old book, but I want to say that it is obvious to me that Mina Harker and Lucy Westenra are lesbians! Mina is always writing about how good and kind men are and how we couldn’t make it without them. Girl, you’re overselling it. Calm down. I also maintain that Mina is autistic. She has every fucking train schedule for England and the continent memorized. She even tells Van Helsing that she is the “train fiend” when he expresses disbelief that she would know all these train times off the top of her head. A train FIEND. Who but an autistic person would do this and describe themselves that way? FIEND!
Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty is situated somewhere in the borderlands between fiction and non-fiction. It’s a novel about the USSR that illuminates how it felt to live through it by imagining what’s in the minds of various real historical figures. We don’t necessarily know if that’s how they thought and what they felt, but Spufford extrapolates from the historical record to give us a sense of the optimism that some people felt at the outset of the USSR, and the pervasive cynicism present by the end. Spufford is insanely talented when it comes to historical and speculative fiction (see this year’s Cahokia Jazz, for example). I learned a lot from it despite it being “fiction,” and I even looked up some of the people and places afterwards to get a stronger picture in my mind. It was very interesting and worth reading.
What does UNRWA do and why has Israel banned it from West Bank, Gaza? via Al Jazeera. This news is almost two weeks old now but I wanted to note it anyway. Israel is banning the United Nations Relief and Works Agency “from conducting activities within Israel’s borders.” It’s grotesque to ban a humanitarian aid organization while they continue their genocide.
Too many Democrats in Sacramento? The downsides of political dominance in California via the LA Times. This article made me laugh. We actually have too many Democrats in the state legislature. Apparently. Well … that’s who we voted for! I think it’s clear we do not want Republican governance in California. If there isn’t enough tension to keep people on their toes, the next step is for the party to splinter so we can get a left-wing branch into office. Just a thought!
25 Years of Indecision With Jon Stewart via The Nation. I appreciated this long profile on Jon Stewart and The Daily Show and its influence on political discourse as we now know it. The article also brought to my attention that the quote about reality having “a well-known liberal bias” is from Steven Colbert’s White House Correspondents’ dinner speech, which I either forgot or never knew, despite the fact that I think of this statement often.
Doing Stuff
Sac Ballet Dracula
Last weekend, I went with my friends to see Sacramento Ballet perform Dracula. I didn’t even know they had a ballet of that, but I guess you can ballet anything (I mean the Royal Ballet is adapting Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam, which is a wild choice and I wish I could see it). It was a very cool production and I’m glad we got to see it! The costumes were cool (I want a giant Dracula cloak), the dancing was great although there was an awful lot of slithering around (it’s how we know Dracula is evil, I guess). I think there ought to be more seasonally themed productions. Sure, Christmas has The Nutcracker, but we should get a spooky Halloween ballet every year too.
Wikipedia
I am proud to report that Ana and I finished reviewing my translation of the Bush v. Gore (2000) Wikipedia article and I published in on Spanish Wikipedia here. I thought it might be relevant to the election so I translated it. It turned out not to be relevant, but now Spanish-speakers can understand what the hell happened in that election. I also learned a lot in the process, so it was good for me if nothing else. Wikipedia says that there have been 251 visits to the page though, so at least someone is looking at it.
Rather than watch election news on Tuesday and Wednesday, I decided to copy edit some long Wikipedia articles. You may not think this is a good way to distract myself from the horrors, but I edited the 2024 Salvadoran general election article. This reminded me that things really could be worse. It is also 14,000 words long so it kept my attention for quite a while so I didn’t spend Tuesday doom scrolling.
I’m still slowly working through translating some articles about the Skagafjörður region in Iceland. Here’s a recent one: Hrolleifsdalur (it’s a valley). I also found that there are some articles connected to this subject in Spanish but not English, like this one about Hjalti Þórðarson, so I have started translating some of those to work on the topic from multiple directions. Doing this stuff is genuinely fun to me and makes me happy. I love filling in the links between articles I’ve worked on. I’m having a good time!
Corporeal Form
For everyone who has told me I am a “high-functioning” autistic person, I want to explain that I have been paying out of pocket for my CPAP supplies since I got diagnosed with sleep apnea in 2018. I have insurance. Insurance would be for these things. I do not understand how to order them through my insurance and, when I first got the CPAP, Kaiser wasn’t paying for the mask I wanted, so I’ve been buying the masks and everything else that insurance probably does have online with my own money like an idiot for years because navigating this stuff is too hard. However, I recently womaned up and figured it out (after six years of not figuring it out lol). I had to talk to five different people on the phone and I did cry at one point but we got it sorted out. I had to get my doctor to tell the sleep clinic people that I still need a CPAP (apparently they stop authorizing you for equipment if you don’t order it every so often which kinda makes sense but also sleep apnea doesn’t just go away??). I finally found out that Kaiser has a third-party company that I have to order through so I am doing this now. This felt extremely difficult but I’m glad it’s done because I literally spend hundreds of dollars a year on it.
I haven’t been doing anything too thrilling in the kitchen lately, but of course I am still cooking because, you know, gotta eat every day. Last weekend I roasted a chicken. It’s both a good meal and part of my Thanksgiving preparations because I like to use homemade broth to punch up my holiday recipes. I a;sp made baked farro and lentils with feta, which I’ve done before but it has become part of my weeknight repertoire. I used this roasted acorn squash recipe to accompany the lentils and I liked it a lot. The squash came out great. Finally, it is soup season so I tried a new-to-me soup recipe from The Daily Soup cookbook: chickpeas with penne and gorgonzola. I thought I would love this recipe but it was just okay to me. The instructions didn’t call for blending it, but it was so oniony and I knew I was not going to like it if I had to keep eating tons and tons of little wisps of wilted onion and leek. Onions are great but I don’t always like how they feel. I probably won’t make this one again but I am planning to keep delving into that cookbook because there are many soups that I haven’t made before.
Of course, we cannot forget that last week was Día de los Muertos, so I had to make a traditional pan de muerto for the occasion. It was good! I love bread!
chicken dinnerfarro and lentils with acorn squashchickpea, penne, and gorgonzola soupannual pan de muerto
Cat Therapy
I’ve been missing Huey a lot lately. Whenever I came home, she would be near the door to shout at me, so I was in the habit of looking for her. Since she was black and it’s been getting darker earlier, I keep scanning for her when I open the door so I don’t run into her but, of course, she’s not there. Here’s a Huey photo from the archives.
miss you, Huey cat
Finally, here is Fritz for your nerves.
Fritz wilding out on the cat treefritz the cuddle catFritz being cozy
