The whole point of the current iteration of ICE is to take all of the Proud Boys and white supremacist shitheads who love Trump and the idea of a white ethnostate and give them a gun and a fake uniform and let them go to town. The same sort of people who saw to it that Heather Hayer was killed<\/a> while counterprotesting the Unite the Right ralley in Charlottesville in 2017 are now people with the government’s blessing to terrorize us in an official capacity. The House of Representatives voted this week to allocate $63 billion to homeland security, “including some $10 billion directly to ICE<\/a>” (the Senate is claiming they will block funding<\/a> for this, but we’ll see what happens). The only reason to put more money into ICE is to terrorize the population, tear families apart, and put people in detention centers where people may simply go missing<\/a>. As a post I saw on Bluesky<\/a> today reads, “ICE is going to continue to kill people because the purpose of a system is what it does.” What other reason is there to fund ICE specifically (I will remind the reader that ICE was only established in 2003), if not to promote state violence against its people. <\/p>\n\n\n\n We’re in our own Years of Lead<\/a> and unfortunately, the only way out is through. <\/p>\n\n\n\n For those of us with a burning need to do something, here are some fundraisers\/mutual aid requests from the brave people of Minnesota currently on the front lines against ICE:<\/p>\n\n\n\n We must all be ready for these ICE incursions to come to us. It’s clear that this is not going to be the end of it, even though it is supremely idiotic to invade winter people during winter. Here in Sacramento, NorCal Resist<\/a> is the local group organizing rapid response to ICE and doing a lot of other work to support immigrants. If you live elsewhere, you certainly have a local group doing this work. If you don’t: start one!<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you don’t want to join a group, I invite you to think about the technology you’re using and how it’s feeding into the surveillance apparatus. 404 Media published a big piece<\/a> on how Palantir is weaponizing all the data they have collected from our phones and is sharing it with ICE so they can decide which neighborhoods to raid. A big list of apps<\/a> that leak your data was also published recently, so it’s a good idea to check if any of your weird random game apps are tattling on you (Candy Crush is). Check your app permission settings and turn off as many as you can if you can’t delete the app. If you’ve been using a Ring camera, now is the time to get rid of it. Ring is partnering with Flock<\/a> to to share footage with law enforcement. Finally, here’s a map of businesses supporting ICE<\/a>. Let’s shop local and avoid them! It’s going to take many diverse actions from a large number of people to limit the amount of data companies have to use against us and show that supporting ICE is a bad business decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n R. F. Kuang’s latest novel, Katabasis<\/a>, is another entry in the “grad school is awful” genre (see also: Kuang’s previous book, Babel<\/a>), with this book literally featuring a journey into hell to retrieve the main character’s PhD advisor. To be fair, the protagonist is in graduate school for magic, so a sojourn to hell isn’t completely beyond the pale, but the metaphors throughout hell’s various courts truly emphasize the infernal nature of higher education. As Alice and Peter move through hell, they encounter the dead doing hard time for various sins and by “hard time” I mean that everyone has to write and submit a thesis to get out of hell and reincarnate. I really liked this book. I appreciated the tension of the characters trying to figure out how to be honest with themselves and each other about what they actually want after years of submitting themselves to their academic careers and abusive advisor. I think everything Kuang writes is brilliant but, considering that she herself is currently working on her PhD I think we do have to ask: girl, are you okay?<\/p>\n\n\n Cinder House<\/a> by Freya Marske is a Cinderella <\/em>retelling, in which Ella is a bisexual ghost. After Ella’s stepmother poisons both Ella and her father, Ella dies and finds herself reawakened as a ghost bound to her family home. In fact, as a ghost she is the house and the house is her; she can touch and move things within the house and she feels pain when someone damages it. Her step-family immediately start using this against her, so Ella is forced to spend her afterlife cooking, cleaning, and otherwise maintaining a home. What’s even the point of dying if you have to do all that? When a storm blows a roof tile off, Ella discovers that she’s able to leave the property if she carries the tile, but she magically reappears in the house at midnight, no matter where she has gone. There is, of course, a ball\u2014it is a Cinderella tale\u2014and Ella gets magicked into human form so she can attend the festivities. I will refrain from saying more and spoiling it, but this is a short, very fun and satisfying read that I recommend!<\/p>\n\n\n All of Us Murderers<\/a> by KJ Charles is a historical romance set in a spooky gothic mansion with hateful relatives bickering over inheritance (the scariest thing of all). I don’t usually like scary stuff, but I didn’t think this was too frightening, and I knew that, given the constraints of the genre, there would be a logical explanation for everything. The story focuses on Zeb, whose ADHD ways (as we are meant to interpret them; they weren’t diagnosing people with ADHD in 1910 or whatever) irritate his apparently respectable family members. Zeb’s cousin has invited the family to his weird house in the country and told them that whoever marries his ward will get all the inheritance. Of course, things are not as they seem, etc. The plot also involves Zeb’s reconciliation with his ex, Gideon, who his cousin hired as a secretary. I don’t want to spoil anything but I did enjoy this book a lot. I thought the way the author handled the main character’s ADHD traits was both realistic and compassionate. Something nice about historical fiction, and it is true of this book, is we can put ourselves in the past and imagine creating a fairer world. We all want to think that we wouldn’t be terrible just because there were terrible elements in our society (ahem), and giving readers a way to imagine that for themselves is joyful and a good way to train our minds to behave well in the present.<\/p>\n\n\n The New Age of Sexism: How Emerging Technologies Are Reinventing Misogyny<\/a> by Laura Bates investigates how the same old misogyny is present in some of the latest tech, considering the impact of products like AI and sex robots. Bates explains that “the inequalities and oppression of our current society” are being coded into new technologies that are extremely efficient at violating women’s privacy. For example, there are now many sites where people can feed in photos of someone and get AI-generated nudes of that person and, unfortunately, “research suggests that 96 percent of deepfakes are nonconsensual pornography, 99 percent of which features women.” It is terrible that our society has developed new tools that seem to exist exclusively to terrorize women. Furthermore, the burden for dealing with these images is entirely on the victim\u2014police are unhelpful and generally don’t understand the internet and websites only remove images if the victim specifically requests it. As Bates puts it, “by making these technologies widely accessible, we as a society are giving men a powerful delusion of ownership over the bodies of any women they choose.” One argument that proponents of letting men run wild online with chatbot girlfriends or sex dolls is that it gives them a place to play out their violent fantasies so they don’t bring them into the real world. The idea is that an “inanimate, unharmable substitute [bears] the brunt of male rage and violence while the rest of us escape,” but this does not prove true. These behaviors leak into the real world and more likely serve as a training ground or a “prototype,” which is why these technologies are a source of concern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What I did not like about this book is that Bates puts way too much stock into some of this technology. She has an entire chapter about the Metaverse, which is a product that almost no one used<\/a> and that Meta has just stopped developing<\/a>. Granted, Bates could not have seen that particular detail coming, but the Metaverse was never once popular. Bates also either does not know or does not address the fact that chatbots are not truly intelligent, but are in fact glorified autocomplete engines known as large language models (LLMs). In several vignettes, she puts on different personas to ask chatbots questions to elicit sexist answers, then later points out the sexism and gives the bot a chance to “explain” itself. The bot invariably “apologies,” but it isn’t self-aware, it’s just stringing together probable sequences of words. While, yes, all these AI chatbots are certainly peddling in stereotypes, the answer isn’t a bot trained on a feminist dataset (as one company mentioned in the book offers). We need to stop asking questions of the Machine that Lies and then being shocked by anything it says. That said, I do agree with Bates overall that it is critical to understand how our culture’s sexism and rampant violence against women is being coded into new technologies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Since I’m done wearing braces but now have a retainer to wear for the rest of my life, I spent a little time looking into the best way to keep it clean; cleaning it under the tap with my toothbrush has been both annoying and only partially effective. I bought one of these ultrasonic cleaners<\/a> and so far I like it. It works pretty well but I do still have to knock off just a little gunk with the toothbrush, although that is much better than what I was doing before. I get the feeling that these companies make their money off selling little cleaning tablets, but I read those aren’t necessary and you can add a drop of unscented dish soap in with the retainers to get it clean instead, which is what I’m doing. I guess you could use scented soap but then you’ll have to put something in your mouth that smells like lemon or some shit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve got two things to share for people who are trying to keep corporations from scooping up all their data. First, the State of California now has a website<\/a> where you can request that data brokers delete your data and stop selling your personal information. Unfortunately, this is only good for California residents, but perhaps other states will join in soon. The second thing is OsmAnd maps<\/a>, which I am hoping to use as a replacement for Google maps. They use publicly available data from Open Street Map<\/a> and they work offline! You can download the map for your area and have it handy even without an internet or data connection. I have yet to use it in the wild but I’ve downloaded the app and my local map.<\/p>\n\n\n\n About a week and a half ago, I got my doctor to give me another cortisone shot for my knee pain. The first one I had kept me pain-free for about a month, but by the end of December I was in intense pain. With this shot, I was feeling good but then a few days later, I was already in a lot of pain again and I was very discouraged about it. Not coincidentally (and possibly TMI but we have to be able to talk about this stuff!) my period started the same day as the pain! When my period was over, the pain went away! I was conferring with people I know and looking into it a little online and the hormonal changes during menstruation can cause pain flares! Wow, being a lady is full of cool stuff.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I started taking a water aerobics class and it’s actually a lot of fun. I wasn’t really sure what to expect, but it is nice to be in the pool and jog and jump around in the water. The class is at night and right now it’s cold, so the worst part is getting out of the pool and freezing my ass off, but I have bought some nice sweat pants and I will live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For anyone looking for a sticker update, my sticker system for exercising is working great. It’s just frivolous enough to motivate me. I do want a sticker, and I won’t get it if I don’t do my stuff. This would not work if I were using something more important. If I told myself I get a special snack after exercising, I would be like “well, that’s a made-up rule and I’m allowed to have a snack anytime, actually.” So, I’ve found a happy medium for how my (autistic and demand-avoidant) brain works. Highly recommended!<\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve been back on my beans recently! For lunch last week, I made a batch of polenta and topped that with snowcap beans and a bunch of cheese, inspired by this post from Cheese Sex Death<\/a>. It was simple and tasty. I was a little late on cooking my lucky new year’s black-eyed peas, but I did get it done this month so I think that still counts. I made black-eyed peas with coconut milk and berebere<\/a>, then served that over rice and we liked it. I blended all the tomatoes and stuff together before adding the beans because I am fine with tomatoes for flavor but their texture displeases me. I’m also sharing a picture of a grilled cheese because it was a good one and that needs to be celebrated (the bread is two-for-one multigrain loaf<\/a> in case you’re wondering).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The best thing I made this week was peanut butter cookies. I had been yearning for cookies all day and then made some at like 9:30 at night and I feel like that was a great choice. The recipe is from 100 Cookies<\/a> and it suggests candying some peanuts to add to the cookie dough, which is a pro move. I want to try the recipe again with some of my fancy peanut butter flavors then add the corresponding nuts. I will report back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Finally, here are some cat photos for your nerves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hello, friends and enemies. I hope everyone is surviving January. I hope we are finding opportunities to be whimsical little creatures despite the horrors around us and appreciating time with our friends. So much sucks right now and I think it’s so important to, while battling the horrors, put some effort being into weirdos and…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[248],"tags":[462,284,245,347,247,249,402,346,409,463,162,195],"class_list":["post-5031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weekly-update","tag-462","tag-baking","tag-books","tag-bullshit-times","tag-cats","tag-cooking","tag-corporeal-form","tag-january","tag-mr-fritz","tag-stickers","tag-surveillance","tag-trumps-america"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3ni6N-1j9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5031"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5031\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5065,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5031\/revisions\/5065"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Do Something for Minnesota<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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Do Something in Your Community<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Books and Other Words<\/h2>\n\n\n
![\"book](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/IMG_20260111_125118161_HDR-scaled-e1769310615116-700x825.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"cover](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/IMG_20260117_161926531_HDR-scaled-e1769311136671-700x705.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"cover](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/IMG_20260122_223411293_HDR-scaled-e1769311264470-700x989.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"cover](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/IMG_20260119_173747910_HDR-scaled-e1769311622715-700x743.jpg\")
<\/a>Rampant Consumerism<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Computer World<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Corporeal Form<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Moving It<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"paper](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/IMG_20260118_164544101_HDR-scaled-e1769311509883-700x1223.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Me](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/IMG_20260114_182517479-scaled-e1769311056533-700x763.jpg\")
<\/a>Kitchen Witchery<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"a](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/IMG_20260112_132615429_HDR-scaled-e1769310756953-700x524.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"a](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/IMG_20260113_195035481_HDR-700x527.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"a](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/IMG_20260122_132339072_HDR-scaled-e1769311464847-700x445.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"a](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/IMG_20260121_213205175_HDR-1-scaled-e1769311336209-700x670.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"peanut](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/IMG_20260121_221659285_HDR-scaled-e1769311403518-700x485.jpg\")
<\/a>Cat Therapy<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
![\"Fritz](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/IMG_20260113_112156365_HDR-scaled-e1769310837804-700x916.jpg\")
<\/a>![\"Fritz](\"https:\/\/digitalmanticore.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/IMG_20260122_190658590_HDR-scaled-e1769311192712-700x664.jpg\")
<\/a>