"2. Twenty months later: recovery but not to baseline"
(This means that masking, even after a covid infection, is worthwhile because it will help lower infection from other diseases. Dosage matters! The fewer infectious particles that get into the body, the easier it will be for the immune system. even weakened, to contain them.)
At this point if I have a circadian rhythm it seems to be measured in days, but last night after two doctor's appointments and an evening of virtual seminars through the euphemistically designated career center, I fell over for something like a cumulative thirteen hours and still got through this afternoon's calendar of calling more doctors and the next stage of the career center in time to run out into a cold pastel sunset out of which the occasional flake of snow drifted with insulting singularity. I am delighted by the rediscovery of silent Holmes and also by my camera's cooperation when trying again for the beautiful fungi I had spotted on an earlier walk, clustered on the stump of what used to be a sidewalk tree and has now pivoted to Richard Dadd. I dreamed intensely and have no idea what Alex Horne was doing in there.
I normally do this at the end of the year, but I'm doing it early this year because I'll be out of town 'til the 27th, and I don't really expect much to change; all my publications for the year are publicated. See the tag for previous years' updates!
This year's cover grid:
3 full-length novels, 2 novellas, 1 collection. That's honestly much better than I was expecting; I spent most of the year clawing my way back from burnout, and the final two books were slammed out at the end of the year when suddenly my creative brain came back online.
Thursday, sunny and cold, but everybody's acting like it's summer, because the temps are in the 30sF as opposed to the mid-teens F.
The plowguy arrived at 7:30 and cleared the drive, and the steps and the turnaround, and the short path from the steps to the side door of the garage and! cleared the berm in front of the garage door. Best. Plowguy. Ever.
Went to P(hysical) T(herapy); got my hairs cut; stopped at the PO; made a smol tour of Dollar Store and Reny's looking for a ball (for PT), and found one at Five Below. Heated up leftover soup for lunch, and have leftovers, because it became a sorta refrigerator soup, since I had a little bit of this, and a little bit of that, and a little bit of that over there . . . Anyhoots, I have leftover soup, some of which will join the other soup in the freezer. I've washed dishes, done my duty to the cats and need to do another couple things before I go out to meet and greet the new town manager.
Before I go dashing off, however, I have a question from the mailbag, to wit!
"when the current book gets too long, why don't you split it in two books?"
And the answer is!
Don't wanna.
Lest I seem surly, I'll unpack that a little.
I have three books left under contract, the book I'm working on and two more*. I know, in broad terms, what the two remaining books are about, and neither one of them is a continuation of the story I'm working on now.
Therefore, the solution to the current story needing more room is to write a longer-than-usual-for-us book. So, that's what I'm doing.
I'll note that we have occasionally, in the past, intended to write only one book and wound up writing two -- Fledgling and Saltation leap to mind, as does Ribbon Dance and Diviner's Bow. Or like that time we intended to write seven books and wound up writing 27 -- and counting.
So, that's the news from the Cat Farm and Confusion Factory for now.
How's everybody doing? ______ *Yes, there may be more Liaden books in future. Or, yanno, there may not. My particular understanding with the universe at this point, and always bearing in mind, "Man proposes; God disposes." (aka Man plans; the Universe laughs), is that I will finish the books currently under contract and then I'll See.
About two months ago, I had a nasty respiratory infection. And while I was lying awake one night, I could hear my heart beating quite loudly.
Having had multiple friends go to the doctor to check on something and then have the doctor tell them that they urgently needed medication before their high blood pressure did them serious damage/killed them, I thought I should pop in to the doctor for a chat.
They checked me on the spot, said my blood pressure was a little high, but nothing terrible, and told me to join the queue to borrow a blood pressure device. danieldwilliam gave me his old one, and I spent a couple of weeks taking results. Which mostly showed that my pressure is fine in the morning, but that after I've spent 90 minutes shouting at Gideon to stop bloody well mucking about and go to sleep, it's a fair chunk higher than it should be. They also sent me for an ECG (which showed I have Right Bundle Branch Block, a harmless and untreatable condition that affects 15% of the population), an eye test (which found nothing), and a fasting blood test (which showed I'm still not diabetic, even though I can't have sugar in my diet even slightly any more).
They then had a phone call with me to chat it through, said that I'm a little high (on average), and a little young for it to be a major worry, but if I was up for it they could put me on some pills for hypertension.. I agreed that it sounded sensible, and the doctor sounded positively relieved that she hadn't had to bully me into it.
The weird feeling is that this is the first time I've been put on to a medicine that I will have to take for the rest of my life. There is now "The time I didn't have to take medicine every day" and "The time where I had to take medicine every day". Which definitely feels like an inflection point in my life. (Endless sympathy, of course, for people I know who have to take much worse things than a tiny tasteless pill with very few side-effects.)
So all-in-all, nothing major. Just the next step. I'm just very glad for the existence of modern medicine.
Perhaps Rubio should also insist they write everything in BOLD CAPS like the glorious leader?
ETA: what I hadn't noticed initially was that Rubio specifically calls it out for being a DEI_A_ initiative. Apparently accessibility as a whole is now un-American.
I am still job searching. It's extremely rough out there, and I have not been able to get very far in interviews for the same job I left at this company because I am so early career. I've been getting feedback from companies when they do not move forward with me that they just have more candidates with more experience, always.
Money is at least sorted for the short-term. Assuming I can in fact sell this place and find somewhere else to live, it's sorted medium-term as well. Beyond that, I refer you to John Maynard Keynes: "In the long run, we are all dead."
(Context makes that quote much more interesting than simple fatalism. Keynes was arguing with someone claiming that certain economic policies would make things worse in the short term but in the long run we'd all be much better off. Keynes believed strongly in fixing what we could now, an attitude I appreciate even when I have trouble implementing it. Can't have a better future if you can't get yourself into the future.)
Books on shelves, roof overhead, food in pantry, snoring cat. Breaking out the xmas stuff this weekend, I think. Could be worse.
... I don't think I've ever been working on FIVE books at the same time ever before. Currently in-process are:
Light of Reason: The next Jason Wood novel/collection, this one starts with "Bait and Switch" and so far includes "Burnout" and, in process, "Feet on the Ground", with one bridge section. Not sure if there'll be one or two more pieces in this one or if those will be for the third and probably last purely Jason collection.
Adventurer's Academy: The story of a group of would-be Adventurers at the often-mentioned Academy during the same time period as my other fantasy series on Zarathan, featuring Lalira Revyne and Spinesnarl Mudswimmer from my short story "The Adventurer and the Toad".
The Impractical Quest: The tale of Enochlis Book-Bound, a bilarel (ogre) who wants to be a wizard despite the limitations of his people. Enochlis is seen also in the second book of the Spirit Warriors trilogy.
Articles of Faith: Fifth book in the Arenaverse series, picking up shortly after Shadows of Hyperion left off.
Unity of Vengeance: Xavier Ross actually gets to go after the people who killed his brother.
Arthur was an old friend of mine, in both senses of the word. I'd known him through apas from 1978, and we met in person a couple years after that. But he was also older than most of his cohort in fandom, having entered with a splash with his first personalzine in the spring of 1977, when he was 34, an unusual age when most neofans were in their teens or early 20s. He died a couple days ago at 83, after long illnesses.
Living at first in Westchester County, New York, and then moving to Durham, N.C., to attend library school, he was geographically far removed from most of the members of the apas I knew him in. When one of the apas ran a photo-cover, Arthur submitted a picture taken in a photo booth which made him look like a gnome tucked in a corner. I attended the collation, and as members perused the completed mailing with its key to the cover photos, I heard occasional cries of "That's Arthur?"
Without physical presence, it was the quality of his writing that made him a valued member of both our apas and fanzine fandom in general. He wrote long and thoughtful essays, many informed by his reading of Thomas Pynchon, Ayn Rand, H.P. Lovecraft, and above all the Illuminatus! trilogy of Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, all of which he took as very interesting and provocative, but none of which he viewed without a skeptical eye. Arthur was also a great quipster, leaving fanzines littered with witty and insightful bon mots. Someone sent him as a joke some volumes of treacly moral tales for children called Uncle Arthur's Bedtime Stories, and our Arthur used that as a fanzine title for a while.
He was full of wit and bon mots in person, also, in a light textured voice with a trace of New York accent, when I finally met him at a convention. Without the gnome extension, he looked like this - a little later on, after his dark hair and beard turned white. Earlier than that, in 1983, I actually ventured down to Durham to visit Arthur at home. By this time he had acquired a permanent romantic partner, an English lit grad student named Bernadette Bosky, whom Arthur had first met in the pages of a Lovecraft-oriented apa. She seemed so perfectly matched for Arthur's distinctive character that some of those reading about her from far away doubted that she could possibly be real, and one of my goals in traveling to Durham was to be one of the first outside fans to meet her and confirm her corporeal existence.
Later, after my visit, Arthur and Bernadette were joined by Kevin Maroney as a third for their romantic triad. I'm not the only observer who's frequently pointed at them as proof that such a relationship can be stable and permanent. Then they moved back up to Westchester, whence Arthur had originally come, and settled in a house in Yonkers they called Valentine's Castle (Valentine was the name of the street). Here they became much more personally active in fandom, going to conventions especially the ICFA in Florida. I never got to that, but I do cherish having introduced my own B. to all three of them at Nolacon in 1988. Meanwhile, they had founded their own apa and held private conventions for its members; and many people came to see them at home, including me. I think I stayed over twice, and I met their pet rats, which were actually quite cute and had rat-pun names.
I got to know both Bernadette and Kevin as individuals, but Arthur was always there, though receding in the background a little as age-related illnesses began to take over. I'm sorry that physical problems of my own prevented my attendance at a big party they held a couple years ago. And now Arthur is gone, but at least we still have vivid memories of him, and his fanzines to read.
The 1870s were a high point of anti-enclosure struggles in the London area, following on from a decade of (mostly, though not exclusively) peaceful campaigns to prevent large open spaces being developed in the 1860s. Wanstead Flats in 1871, Chiselhurst Common in 1876, Eelbrook Common (Fulham) in 1878, all saw direct action against fences, as part of long-running resistance against the theft of common land. .... Many of these struggles were characterised by the large-scale involvement of radical movements, as London radicals, secularists and elements who would later help to form socialist groups made open space and working class access to it a major part of their political focus. Radical land agitation, notably through the Land and Labour League, was beginning to revive the question of access to land as a social question, and within cities this manifested as both battles to defend green space, and propaganda around the theft of the land from the labouring classes.
The struggle is not over:
Centuries of hard fought battles saved many beloved places from disappearing, and laws currently protect parks, greens and commons. But times change… Pressures change. Space in London is profitable like never before. For housing mainly, but also there are sharks ever-present looking to exploit space for ‘leisure’. And with the current onslaught on public spending in the name of balancing the books (ie cutting as much as possible in the interests of the wealthy), public money spent on public space is severely threatened. Many are the pressures on open green spaces – the costs of upkeep, cleaning, maintenance, improvement, looking after facilities… Local councils, who mainly look after open space, are struggling. Some local authorities are proposing to make cuts of 50 or 60 % to budgets for parks. As a result, there are the beginnings of changes, developments that look few and far between now, but could be the thin end of the wedge. So you have councils looking to renting green space to businesses, charities, selling off bits, shutting off parks or parts of them for festivals and corporate events six times a year… Large parts of Hyde Park and Finsbury Park are regularly fenced off for paying festivals already; this could increase. Small developments now, but maybe signs of things to come. Now is the time to be on guard, if we want to preserve our free access to the green places that matter to us.
HEIR’s mission is to rescue neglected and endangered photographic archives, unlock their research potential, and make them available to the public. HEIR contains digitised historic photographic images from all over the world dating from the late nineteenth century onwards. HEIR’s core images come from lantern slide and glass plate negatives held in college, library, museum and departmental collections within the University of Oxford. New resources are being added all the time, including collections from outside the University.
The heritage body publishes a roundup of unusual listings to draw attention to the diversity of places that join the national heritage list for England each year. As well as the anti-tank defences, this year’s list of 19 places includes a revolutionary 1960s concrete university block, a model boat club boathouse built in 1933 by men who were long-term unemployed, and a magical suburban “elf garden”.
The act of looking has become commodified as technology companies ‘mine and sell our attention like coal’, as Kee writes. Letting art history become endangered and drift further into elite status is not only unfair, it’s also perilous. ‘Art history gives you tools to interpret the visual world and makes you more of a critical viewer of political messages, advertising and a barrage of social media images,’ says Perry. ‘It’s dangerous if you can’t examine these things critically.’
It's December Days time again. This year, I have decided that I'm going to talk about skills and applications thereof, if for no other reason than because I am prone to both the fixed mindset and the downplaying of any skills that I might have obtained as not "real" skills because they do not fit some form of ideal.
10: Accessibility
As you may have gleaned from this series and many others of the type, I am not what you would call typical. This is in some physical manners, because I am Long Being, but mostly, where this is important is in the mental matters, as while I can do most of the necessary functions of life, there are some things, like time and memory, that don't function in "normal" ways. Variable Attention Stimulus Trait means that there are many things that I will tick as done that are not done, but I will only be reminded of that not-done status when it becomes contextually relevant again. Or I will try to remember a thing, and then it will not trigger again until someone else mentions it or there is some other reason for that piece of memory to fire. And sometimes, when I'm doing something that gives me actual dopamine and the feeling of accomplishment, it's not easy to get me to focus on other things. At least, not until I hit some goal of my own and can switch tasks. Which I may not remember the need to, especially if there's been some sort of progression in the game that is now presenting me with new options to explore.
These kinds of situations can happen even in spots where I am attempting to pay attention. So I devised systems to ensure that I had all the things I needed to do done first before engaging in anything that might produce the flow state. And I still use those systems. Even as I type this, there's the lure of other games and things to solve that I would also like to indulge in, but I am refraining because those things are likely to become time sinks, and I want to enjoyably spend my time, rather than recriminate about how I wasted it doing things I enjoyed and neglecting things that should have had higher priority. With appropriate supports and support from other people, I can function as a human being in a society. Mostly, what that takes the form of is "please write the thing down and give it to me, or send me a reminder e-mail or message that I have agreed to this thing, because once I leave this context, I will not remember it until I am in this context again, or at some other random, unhelpful time." This also means a certain amount of not giving me grief about the messiness of my spaces, because my working memory is often embedded in objects that are present in my workspace. They remind me to do certain things when I spot them. Once they are out of my sight, my brain often marks them as completed, even if they're not. Concentration sometimes means having fidgets available to keep the distractions part working on the fidget so that I can concentrate. Or it means taking notes, because taking notes means processing the thing that is happening. Systems at work, and they are always only as good as fixing the last thing that managed to evade or break the system and become a problem, so that will also mean having to be patient with me while I figure out how to prevent the problem from reoccurring. (The solution might very well be, as I wrote above, "please e-mail me when I agree to do a thing.")
Accessibility and accommodation is important to me, because without it, everyone expects me to behave and think and do things the same way they do, and at least one manager tried to fire me because she didn't understand that the things I was doing. She classified them as rude and personal failings, and didn't particularly like my explanations of "I would rather stand up and stay awake than stay seated and fall asleep" (at the time, the things that were interfering with my ability to have restful sleep were not yet diagnosed, so I was working on systems that worked for me at university without understanding why) or "I am paying attention to the participants in the program as I also try to puzzle out this situation in front of me." (Apparently, trusting children and teenagers to be responsible and at least do some amount of managing themselves is completely wrong.) Or even, "I forgot at that moment that this edge case existed to a regular rule, I'm sorry and I have created a flowchart of how the process works to demonstrate to you that I do understand it and I will try not to forget again." (The person being upset at me trumped any and all apology and demonstration that I could put together that this was an honest mistake.) My continued longevity at my place of work in my profession is mostly due to the fact that this manager retired before she could complete the process of getting me fired, and every subsequent manager I have had was either not in place long enough for issues to arise or actually understands that at least some part of your job as a manager is to help your employees do their best work, and sometimes that will mean having to do things in a particular way.
In many other aspects of my life, I benefit greatly from the curb-cut effect, making traversing physical space easier and having greater understanding of what is going on in media programs by being able to turn on subtitling or captioning and read to ensure that what is being said and done matches with what I'm hearing. (I don't use Descriptive Audio, but I think it's great to have available as well.) I can magnify text and pictures so that it's comfortable to view from several feet away, even if I can read it at the smaller, more original size. I have a fair number of tools developed for accessibility that I take advantage of when I get the opportunity to do so, even if they are things that I do not specifically "need" to function. I have not met people who think that I am either somehow taking advantage of something that doesn't belong to me or that I am somehow less human because I use those tools. Not yet, anyway. Most people who have taken me to task do so on the strength or compatibility with their worldview of my ideas and statements, and not because I use certain tools.
Because of the communities I work with, however, and the repeated parts of the instruction that I do on library resources, I am very sensitive to how accessible software packages are, and how many steps it takes to accomplish things, and where there are pain points, annoyance points, or where I end up saying the same things over and over again because they continue to be obstacles and impediments to a successful process. And while I would like to say that any such things that I discover are taken seriously and fixed by the people who make the software, or who control out environment, the reality is that library software and systems is the kind of place where you can count the number of products that do certain tasks on two hands, with some fingers left over, and you can count the number of companies that own those options on one hand and you might still have a finger or two left over. If competition is supposed to be the biggest driver of innovation and the threat of leaving is supposed to be the thing that gets companies to improve their products when there are complaints, then in library systems and software, we don't have enough options to be able to force either of those desired outcomes. And, as both publishing and library systems and services consolidate, we end up with fewer companies in charge of more things, making it even harder to change in the face of a company sucking. In a world where the government was on the lookout for anti-competitive behavior and starting giving serious side-eyes to conglomerates and making menacing gestures with a sledgehammer in hand, we might have that competition, but regulatory capture is a thing, and it's much easier for those who have money to buy politicians and legislation than those without.
So, with the understanding that DRM is an abomination unto Nuggan, but without it, nobody would license material to libraries to lend (and that all of that is basically controlled by one company, Overdrive, even oif other companies and projects exist to try and break that practical monopoly), allow me to complain about the inaccessibility of things that I encounter in my workplace.
First up, Windows. Obviously, our IT department does not want to give us free reign over our staff machines, nor to give the public the ability to make permanent changes to our computers or run or install malware on them. But it appears that their ability to control whether various items in the Control Panel are present is mostly controlled by the categories those items appear in, and perhaps some fine-grained control past that. Which resulted in me filing a ticket with them because the "Do Not Disturb" mode was kicking on while I was doing other things, and it meant I was missing e-mail and chat notifications because the machine assumed that I didn't want to be disturbed. I couldn't turn off DND, it turns out, because DND had been classified by Microsoft as a "Gaming"-related function, and the policy IT set removed the ability to access the Gaming part of the Control Panel. They were able to fix this. This feels like someone at Microsoft said "only the people playing games will use applications in full-screen or maximized modes, and so they're the only ones who will care about whether notifications will interrupt them or not, so stick the do-not-disturb settings in the gaming area," and nobody with the ability to get things changed pointed out that this was a foolish idea and made unfounded assumptions about the users of their product. (The integration of their LLM into basically all Microsoft apps and Windows itself is similarly a foolish decision based on unfounded assumptions about the users of their products, but at least there someone could argue that some people actually do want to use LLMs.)
Another large Windows Accessibility gripe I had is that the Ease of Access features (Microsoft's name for their accessibility features) are not available by default, so that when someone wants to log in to one of our computers, we do not have the option of showing the on-screen keyboard, or several other accessibility features that would make it possible for the machines to be used independently by people with physical disabilities. I had a person with a caregiver who came into the library, who had a USB-A pluggable control mechanism that allowed them to move a mouse cursor without needing their caregiver to do so. But because our Ease of Access functions aren't available by default, this person could not independently sign into our machine. Once the caregiver had typed in the appropriate numbers on the keyboard, then it was possible for the person to navigate merrily along in what they wanted, and to then access some of the Ease of Access features so they could do things independently. I do not know why all of those features are not available right from the jump. Some of them have become so, because I've seen people using the magnifier at the login screen, and then had to undo that work to make the machine ready for the next person. But still no on-screen keyboard toggle anywhere so that a person who can't use the keyboard can still type. (There's probably some sort of security reason to not do this that I don't know about, and I have questions about why we're using software where the presence of an on-screen keyboard somehow introduces a greater security risk than the attached physical keyboard does.)
After a months-long data breach incident, the details of which have not yet been fully revealed to the public or to the staff, we were staring down the barrel of a fair number of paper library card applications that needed to be put into the ILS, once it had been stood back up and the transactions that had been put into it had been run through. I didn't want to spend my time clicking through all of the form fields, so I tried to tab-navigate them, so that I would use as little motion as possible. Which is where I discovered that the form itself is only completely tab-navigable if there's only one entry in the autofill for a given ZIP code. If there more than one option and I have to select from the modal that pops up, the tab navigation resets to the top of the page, and when I get back to that ZIP code, I can't tab through it, even though I've already entered the information, without popping the modal back up and then getting kicked back to the top of the page. I filed a ticket about this, because surely this is a known problem and someone has already figured out how to move the cursor to the next field after the modal has been dismissed. It hasn't been fixed yet, so I still have to do at least one click to do a library card application. I'd hate to have to deal with that as a screen reader user, or someone who doesn't have the ability to consistently click a mouse to the right place.
Most of my accessibility headaches, however, come from the suite that we use to control user access to the computers and that manage the printing from those user accounts. First and foremost among them is the discovery that while the computer access and printing system has to communicate with our ILS, it doesn't actually generate any kind of account on its own systems until the first time that a card number and PIN are used to sign in to a computer, or to make a reservation for a computer. We had a fair number of people who have had cards for a very long time get stymied the first time they try to use our "print from anywhere" option, because the number is right, the PIN is right, and yet the system told them they were an "inactive user." While the fix is relatively simple (make a reservation for them, then cancel that reservation), how much simpler it would be if, say, every day or so, the computer access and printing system would query our ILS for accounts, and then create access and reservation entries in its own system for any numbers that it didn't already have such accounts for. This would not normally be an issue, but the print system runs on a sixty second timer that resets when you press the touchscreen.
Well, I should say that's the only visible timer that runs on the print release station and system. There are several hidden timers running all throughout the printing retrieval process, starting right with the beginning of it. Since we offer such things as print from home, the prompt at the end of the process that involves the person's device is to enter an e-mail address. The print release station is the place where we have an on-screen keyboard, and for people who don't do things particularly quickly, a long e-mail address can take several minutes to type on the keyboard. Several of the people I've been assisting have had their attempts disappear suddenly because we've reached some sort of hidden timeout that starts when the login screen is opened, and which does not reset itself in any way on any kind of keypress on the keyboard. I have been known to type their email addresses in on the second go-round simply because this timer is unforgiving and entirely invisible.
Another hidden timer runs while someone is waiting on various screens to either pay for their printing or use their library card credit, and no, we haven't been allowed to take cash for printing or copying for nearly a decade at this point. (This, too, is a matter of inaccessibility, even though our payment terminals are equipped with NFC readers so that the "tap to pay" options available with various cards or apps all work appropriately. Being cashless has pretty well made us hostile to the unbanked and to those people who would rather flip us a dime for a one-page print, rather than faffing about with a credit card charge of the same amount.) This hidden timer comes into play when we have to activate a supposedly "Inactive" user - even at my fastest, I would still not be able to complete it in the single minute of the visible timer. So I tell the people that they can reset the countdown timer just by pressing on the screen, but at about 45 to 60 seconds of sitting at the payment screen without pressing anything, the system drops back a level to the spot where you would select what you wanted printed from the available options. So, when the user becomes "active," they then have to go back through a couple of procedural steps, including re-scanning their library card and re-inputting their PIN, to get to the spot where they were before and discovered that the system didn't know who they were.
I'm not opposed to timers that exit out automatically and re-set the kiosk for the next person. I am opposed to secret timers that do this, because they create more problems than they solve. And especially secret timers that don't reset themselves.
The interface itself, especially the spot where the payment options are selected, has one glaring inaccessible part to it - only the button is touchable and will engage the labeled function. The text that is next to the button that describes its function is completely not part of the touchable space, and yet, I consistently have to help people who have touched the text, expecting it to be a target space, and who then get confused because something should have happened there. It sometimes takes me an explanation or two of "you have to push the button to the left" before they get to the right target area. And while these are not small buttons, neither are they particularly large, and so I can only imagine what someone with a disability or difficulty with being able to touch the same spot on a screen consistently would experience, in addition to massive frustration that this system doesn't have large enough touch targets for a crucial part of their function.
Oh, and also, apart from the first screen, which can be pinch-zoomed to make the target to start things easier to hit, everything from that point forward is of fixed size and is not zoomable or arrangeable in some form of larger blocks, or otherwise can have a mode for people who need larger touch targets or larger text to read or any other such accessibility concerns. And, while there's supposedly a button to change the language from English to Spanish, the only thing that gets translated is the interface where you put in a library card number and PIN or the e-mail address from the Print from Home option. Once signed in, everything is in English again. I filed a ticket about that, too, and apparently the company came back and told IT, when IT escalated the bug to the software developers, that they only intended to translate that first screen, and not the rest of the options that someone would have to go through to successfully print. That kind of sloppy, inaccessible work would have me advocating really hard for switching to some competitor product that actually gives a single shit about accessibility or language translation. That, of course, assumes there is one. I'm not entirely sure there is, at least with enough corporate support to make it something we would consider purchasing. (If we had an IT department that didn't have all their time consumed by putting out fires, I'd strongly urge us to find solutions that we could basically run and maintain ourselves, so that we could be responsive to comments and queries, instead of expecting and receiving the shrug emoji from the companies that we escalate these issues to.)
So I have multiple complaints about the software that we use, and zero faith that any of the issues that I raise about them will be fixed in any future release. And that's before I start complaining about our website, and our marketing materials, and so many other things that are also probably inaccessible. (although I did finally manage to get the text size bumped up for our digital advertising displays when I pointed it out to the marketing person how small the text was when they were at our location. I think they also need some refreshers on minimum contrast for images.)
The most recent gall for me, however, has been that other IT departments in our public schools have made foolish decisions of their own that render school-issued devices unable to get on our Wi-Fi. Our Wi-Fi uses a captive portal system, which is not my favored way of doing things, but it is at least a system that happens mostly automatically, with the user input needing to be to connect to the network and then to click the "Agree and Connect" button on the captive portal page. For most devices, this works fine, and people can then merrily use the Wi-Fi. For these school-issued devices, however, while they can supposedly connect to the Wi-Fi, they never get the captive portal page to appear, and none of the tricks that I know of to make said page appear work on these devices. As I was helping someone with this particular problem, I think I gained sufficient insight to know what's going on. Both of the sites used to try and generate the captive portal page timed out, and they both wanted to route through the same server and weren't able to do so. Which made me think "oh, no, someone's hard-coded a proxy for all traffic to pass through first." Which would work fine on school networks, or on Wi-Fi networks where you enter a passphrase to connect to the network, and otherwise then have access to the whole Internet from there. But on a captive portal network like ours, we need the connection to go to the captive portal page to start with, and then from there, we can open up the Internet at large. But the computers insist that all traffic has to go through this server first, including the captive portal page, no doubt, and so we have an impasse where the captive portal page needs to be acknowledged first, but the computer has been set up to route through some other server for everything, and therefore it will never let the captive portal appear and be acknowledged.
sigh
So to fix this, we'd have to convince the school IT to let their machines connect to our captive portal (and presumably other ones, too), and then to use their proxy server. There's probably CIPA and/or COPPA compliance issues there somewhere, and other things about who would theoretically be liable if a school computer were used to access age-restricted things, and so forth. Which, since we have trouble connecting with schools anyway, is probably a pipe dream of mine to get these conversations going and the desired result. Our best alternatives here are to use a desktop or library-provided laptop, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's somewhat hard to access your school learning modules and environments from a non school-issued device. So instead our Wi-Fi is inaccessible and students can't do their homework at the library, like they would like to.
And these are the things that I have direct contact with, or that show up in what I work with the public over. I'm sure there are so many other things that are accessibility concerns, or just concerns about whether or not someone feels represented, or safe, or that the library acknowledges their existence. I'd like for use to be better about all of this, but so much of that is in the hands of people with more decision-making power and resource allocation power than I have. And so I don't expect things to get any better any time soon, because the priorities of the library aren't doing a lot of pushing on those things, and the companies that we could be leaning on don't have incentives to improve, because they know we won't really be able to use a competitor product, assuming one exists.
But still I complain, and I file tickets, and I try. That's what I'm supposed to do, and hopefully, one day, things will get fixed. Preferably before someone decides to take us to court over accessibility issues. (This is an exercise in futility sometimes, and it bothers me, but I still try.)
Okay, well, it's not _done_ but my room is a damn sight _better_ and that's pretty cool.
And by "damn sight better" I actually mean "I got rid of two of the boxen that've just been sitting around taking up space all over my room since I moved in in 2020". Which is...fantastic. I'm not remotely done cleaning, either up or out, but progress is happening! That's quite grand! Someday maybe I will have everything tucked away in a place it belongs, having gotten rid of all the things that shouldn't actually be in here. What a good fantasy.
(I am being sharp and salty to cover up the fact that I am actually quite happy to have regained a little bit of space, and irritated at how long it takes me sometimes.)
I am nowhere near finished, of course. My desk is the biggest disaster area (although I've definitely made progress on it, we're like, eight inches deep of shit instead of sixteen). And there's an endless number of papers that want sorting, but that's like, a longterm plan. Not something I expect to get done anytime soon, not even if I'm procrastinating on my grading real good!
That being said, I had a point somewhere in the span of time I've lived in this room where I was trying to sort papers for about twenty minutes a day. Do that for two months and I'd have everything done, I expect. Just....you know. Consistency is hard.
The surface reason I am cleaning is that SamSam is visiting this weekend, but the real weekend is that having my room be a catastrophe is a pretty strong Blues Clue1, and also _definitely_ one of the ones that chickeneggs2 me. So, having latched onto the slight mania of "you have no idea how badly I do not want to do my grading" means actually trying to get my roomspace tolerable?
We're through the long dark November. I made a note in my calendar for November first, next year and all subsequents, telling me that my brain's about to turn into shit and I might want to do something about it. What should I do? No one knows the answer to that.
I mucked with my phone so that it goes into "focus mode" for two hours each afternoon. No games, no internet. Chat is okay, because I almost never am _mindless_ and stuck about chat. So far I haven't broken it, which means that it ~cannot be broken~. Unlike, say, the timers on my various phone games that theoretically say I can only play like 15 minutes unless I go make it longer which is very easy to do. Sigh.
And I'm trying to crawl myself out of the work hellhole --the above is theoretically helpful for this. Man though, I'm looking forward to it being solstice real bad. Arise fair sun, and slay the envious moon3
I hope you are finding the ability to do the things that bring you comfort and joy. I love you!
~Sor MOOP!
1: "what idiot called them depression symptoms instead of..."
2: Did you know that you can just say things? It's ridiculous that language works in any capacity whatsoever! I say so much entirely impenetrable nonsense, and yes, lots of the time it's partly that I'm quoting things, but sometimes it's that, like, I'm just making up weird things that maybe only make sense to me.
So, instead of finding the term "negative feedback loop" my brain decided to hand me "chickenegg", as in "which came first". Am I depressed because my room is a catastrophe or is my room a catastrophe because yadda yadda
3: Case in point, this is a reference! It's a Kate Nyx song lyric.
This is actually something I wrote last winter, February or so, when I was bingeing MASH. I figured that although I could post it at the time I wrote it, I could also wait and post it at actual Christmastime.
Goodnight Moon (1816 words) by Sholio Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: MASH (TV) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Characters: Benjamin Franklin "Hawkeye" Pierce, Charles Emerson Winchester III, B. J. Hunnicutt, Minor Characters Additional Tags: Christmas, Missing Scene, Episode: s09e05 Death Takes a Holiday Summary: Hawkeye makes a discovery. (Missing scene for 9x05 "Death Takes a Holiday," the season 9 Christmas episode.)
It’s a mere two weeks before Christmas, and I’m behind schedule. Today I printed 50 copies of my annual newsletter. Also, today, 23 photo calendars were delivered to my house. Yesterday, I received my Christmas postage stamps – and I updated, reorganized, and printed mailing labels. The only thing that was on time was four boxes of UNICEF Christmas cards, which I ordered a couple of months ago to take advantage of a free shipping offer.
This year I was able to reduce my photo calendar count by two. That was almost enough to compensate for higher printing costs. I used to be able to count on a 50% discount from Zazzle, but in the last maybe 10 years, I could get only a 40% discount. This year I watched and waited but was never offered more than a 30% discount. Net cost is rising everywhere, it seems. Their largest discount is usually offered between Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and I waited until then to place my print order – and that’s why calendar delivery was so late this year.
Interesting change – historically the calendars have been individually wrapped in clear plastic and then shrink-wrapped into bundles of five calendars. This year, the calendars were stacked unprotected and shipped loose. More cost savings, I assume. Packing wasn’t sufficient, and it’s surprising there wasn’t any damage. But everything arrived intact – and less plastic is a good thing.
So I got $600 worth of calendars for $420. Add $20 for shipping and handling. Deduct $60 for calendar royalties from 2024. It comes out to about $16.50 per calendar – which actually isn’t terrible.
The hard part now is writing 45 cards and packaging 20 calendars. That’s what I get for doing old Boomer type things. But theoretically I have the time now to do it. (Ha!) If only I weren’t also working on the house... and finances... and volunteer work. First world problems, indeed.
A week ago, I was visiting an old friend on the edge of the Berkshires, at her central-chimneyed, chestnut-framed, wide-boarded house, coeval with the Boston Tea Party. It was just after the first of December and there was deepish snow, so I had “Sweet Baby James” running through my head. Sadly, we couldn’t go play in it or even slip out to look at the Milky Way on a crystal-clear night, as the temperature was about 0F, with a fierce wind banging in the chimneystack. We would have been slashed to stiff ribbons in an instant.
So we stayed in and looked at her cabinet of curiosities. She’s always had one: leaves and pinecones; playing cards and antique marbles; Qing china. Now her passion is for pocket stones. They are jade, lapis, jasper, malachite, pyrite, hematite, and quartz—oh, and hundreds more I couldn’t name, though she can. They are striped, starred, clouded, marbled; they are tabbied, tessellated, blackworked, eyed and islanded and archipelagoed like antique globes of exoplanets; they’re like phoenix eggs. She has Archaean banded rocks three billion years old, and a little heap of unset opals, flickering with inward fire. It’s all about the pattern and the play of light. She kindly gave me two Nine-colored opals for my birthday. They are tiny—pinky-nail and pomegranate-seed—but they flash with momentary Pleiades.
As previously advertised, it's snowing. I asked Google what the snow accumulation was going to be and it said, "One-point-three-seven inches," and I know it's just messing with me.
The WIP now weighs in at +/-100,700 total words, with more words yet to be written. Despite my having removed manymany words, this is still going to be a long book, as we here in the Liaden Universe(R) count book length. I apologize in advance.
The name of the belly dancer whose clip I shared on FB the other day is Rachid Alexander and at least one 10-minute performance is on youtube. In case anybody might be interested.
In other news, I'm out of cookies. I'm not sure how this keeps happening. Probably the cats eat them when I'm out running errands.
Michael Carbonaro, a magician, is coming to the Waterville Opera House in March and I wanna go see him, because -- Magic! Show! OTOH, I'm looking at the prices and -- eep. Well. He'll prolly sell out without any help from me.
I am going to have to call the lawyers handling the Anthropic business and get myself to a humanbean. It transpires that my affairs are not straightforward, what a surprise, and I'm running out phucks to give, which -- it would be smart to continue with the giving of phucks for a little while longer.
So! Since I'm done writing early today, and the lawyers are in Seattle, where it's just after lunchtime, I s'pose I'll get on the phone.
US at the weekend (new National Security Strategy): We need to oppose Europe for insisting the right to stop hate speech overrides freedom of speech
US today: We're going to insist we can see 5 years of your social media* before we let you into the US in case you said nasty things about us.
So one rule for people saying things they like, and another for people saying things they don't? Not quite sure that's how the Founding Fathers anticipated free speech working.
* Also your phone numbers, your email addresses, plus the names and addresses of family members, including children. And if you've ever worked as a fact checker or in content moderation there is apparently a blanket ban,
Atlas Games have published some very good introductory RPGs and story telling games - this one is very much in that genre, with some fun supplements for different settings and styles of play, from film noir to alien invasions. It's never been offered in these bundles before, it's cheap, and it's being run to promote a forthcoming kickstarter for a superhero rules supplement. Better buy it, or Streaky the super-cat will spit hair-balls at you at mach 5...
* Also you can preorder Platform Decay, the next book in The Murderbot Diaries, at whichever retailer you prefer, and it will be out on May 5, 2026. Published by Tor Books, cover art by Jaime Jones, edited by Lee Harris.
Finished Saving Suzy Sweetchild, which has our protag not only dealing with the usual movie hassle but being called in to deal with the papers of a suddenly deceased in possibly suspicious circumstances academic, as well as (with the usual cohorts) trying to work out what exactly the game is with the apparent kidnapping for ransom of child star, who is beginning to age out of cuteness. We observe that the classic sleuths may sometimes have had two mysteries on their hands but very seldom had to multitask like this.
Some while ago I read an essay by Ursula Le Guin on the novels of Kent Haruf: I fairly recently picked up Our Souls at Night (2015), which is more or less novella length, as a Kobo deal, and it was well-written, and unusual if very low-key, and I daresay I might venture on more Haruf but am in no great rush to do so.
Then on to Upton Sinclair, The Return of Lanny Budd (1953) - perhaps not quite as good as the earlier entries in the series - some of it felt a bit info-dumpy - Lanny and his friends who are promoting peace face the problem of Soviet Stalinist Communism in the Cold War era. I can't help contemplating them and thinking that they are probably going to be sitting targets for HUAC in a few years' time, because they are coming at the issue from a democratic socialist perspective and I suspect their Peace Program is going to be considered deeply sus by McCarthyism. Also, Lanny jnr is going to be of draft age come the 1960s....
On the go
To lighten the mood, Alexis Hall, Audrey Lane Stirs the Pot (Winner Bakes All #3) arrived yesterday.
Up next
The new (double-issue) Literary Review
Also (what was in the straying parcel last week) Dickon Edwards (whom some of you may remember from LJ days?) Diary at the Centre of the Earth: Vol. 1.
An Icelandic horror novella translated by Mary Robinette Kowal! I had no idea she's fluent in Icelandic.
Iðunn experiences unexplained fatigue and injuries when she wakes up, but is gaslit by doctors and offered idiotic remedies by co-workers. (Very relatable!) Meanwhile, she's being semi-stalked by her ex-boyfriend/co-worker, her parents refuse to accept that she's a vegetarian and keep serving her chicken, and the only living beings she actually likes are the neighborhood cats that she's allergic to.
After what feels like an extremely long time, it finally occurs to her that she might be sleepwalking, and some time after that, it finally occurs to her to video herself as she sleeps. At that point some genuinely scary/creepy/unsettling things happen, and I was very gripped by the story and its central mystery.
Is Iðunn going out at night and committing all the acts she's normally too beaten down or scared to do while sleepwalking or dissociating? Is she having a psychotic break? Is she a vampire? Is she possessed? Does it have something to do with a traumatic past event that's revealed about a third of the way in?
Other than the last question, I have no idea! The ending was so confusing that I have no idea what it was meant to convey, and it did not provide any answers to basically anything. I'm also not sure what all the thematic/political elements about the oppression of women had to do with anything, because they didn't clearly relate to anything that actually happened.
This was a miss for me. But I was impressed by the very fluent and natural-sounding translation.
Content note: A very large number of cats are murdered. Can horror writers please knock it off with the dead cats? At this point it would count as a shocking twist if the cat doesn't die.
By the time today ends I will have shoveled our driveway and ways at least four times over the course of two days. We're finally getting a new garage door and opener, having needed one for several years. We had to wait for a non-standard-sized door to be ordered[^2], then once it arrived, we scheduled the installation for yesterday. Then, the night of the day before yesterday, it started snowing.
Yesterday morning, I called the garage door company to see if they would need to reschedule because of the weather. The woman I spoke to sounded almost amused by the idea. Since then, I have shoveled:
Yesterday morning, so I could get our vehicles out and the technician could get his truck to the garage.
Yesterday evening, so the technician could get his truck out of the driveway and I could get our vehicles back in.
Early this morning, so I could get our van out and go to the doctor. This included shoveling the huge piles that the snow plows had deposited at the end of the driveway.
Later this morning, when I got back from the doctor, I had to shovel the rest of the driveway so we can play vehicle Tetris[^3] and the technician can finish the garage door.
It's currently snowing, but not as hard as yesterday, so I may or may not have to shovel again when the technician has to leave this evening. Plus, I'll have to shovel the end of the driveway again when the city plows the sidewalks, which may or may not happen today. So I guess this winter's definitely giving me my exercise!
[^1] If you recognized the musical reference in the title, I'd like to offer my sincere apologies. If you didn't, please don't go looking for it — I doubt you need an earworm, and I'd prefer that you not think ill of me.
[^2] Because of course our house required a non-standard-sized door.
[^3] Right now we're forbidden to park on the street, so that the plows can run. When the technician gets here, A. and I will have to back our vehicles out of the driveway, then he'll back his truck up the driveway to the garage, then we'll pull back into the driveway. Then we'll have to do the whole thing in reverse when he leaves.
As the title indicates, "Threnody for Five Actors" is a ghost poem for its subjects and its inclusion in On Actors and Acting: Essays by Alexander Knox (ed. Anthony Slide, 1998) is maddening because it is accompanied only by the note, "This poem is from an unpublished manuscript titled Screams and Speeches. The five actors named here were all victims of the Blacklist." First of all, you can't drop the existence of an entire manuscript at the very end of a slim selected works and expect the interested reader not to scream, especially when the only copy the internet feels like telling me about seems to be held in a collection in the Library and Archives of Canada, which feels currently even less accessible than the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Secondly, and speaking as a person who has been called out for the density of allusion in their stories and poetry, this poem could have done with some notes. The editor was obviously concerned enough about name recognition to parenthesize Julie Garfield as John and Bud Bohnen as Roman, but then why not list their dates so that the reader can see for themselves that all five actors died between 1949 and 1952, mostly of heart ailments, stressed by the hounding of the FBI and HUAC, at the grandly superannuated ages between 39 and 59? If you don't know that Mady Christians originated the title role of John Van Druten's I Remember Mama (1944), then her verse will make much less sense, but catching that one makes me wonder what other references I may be missing, such as in the stage work of Canada Lee or J. Edward Bromberg. Lastly, since it's the only poem I have ever read by Alexander Knox—instantaneously in October, but it's been a rough fall—if he wrote any others I'd like to be able to read them, even if just for comparison. Slide mentions his wicked limericks in the introduction, but unforgivably includes none.
With this one example to go by, he was a better playwright than poet, but except for the self-deprecation which should definitely have hit the cutting room floor, it's hard to want to edit much out of a poem with so much anger at the injustice of a country that wastes its artists in scapegoating xenophobia, besides which there's at least one good line per actor and sometimes more. He wouldn't even have been living in the United States by the time of its writing, having burned off the last of his contract with Columbia by the end of 1951. He hadn't burned off his anger. No reason he should have. I may be confused by the existence of his Hollywood career, but I'm still pissed about the politics that snapped it short. The twentieth century could stop coming around on the guitar any measure now. On Sunday, I'll be at the HFA.
Wednesday. Gloomy with intermittent snow. Warmer than yesterday, but not warm.
Rook joined me for my early sunlight and tea. Tali would like to join me, but she can't figure it out yet. We're all a Little Much for Tali, I fear.
Breakfast was oatmeal. Lunch will be store-bought spinach quiche and a side of soup. Oven heating for the quiche now. Did Session One of the PT homework.
Wrote a couple thousand new! words this morning. Which -- one of the good things about the Write What You Know Method, beside racking up a lot of words early, is that, while you DO have to do a fair amount of timeline-wrasslin', and build bridges, the bridge-building is mostly smooth, once you've figured out what the story is about.
Yes, I do keep saying that.
The plan for the remainder of the day after lunch is to do my duty the cats, take a short walk, and get back with the WIP. And do Session Two of the PT homework; I've come to like doing that after I've served up Happy Hour.
Tomorrow, I have PT early, a haircut scheduled mid-morning, and I really do need to get to the grocery. And probably the post office.
Meet 'n Greet with the new Town Manager in the evening. I have a ticket. I'm starting to waffle on Do I Really Want To Go. It'll probably come down to how's the weather?
The cats are all back in Steve's office, snuggling into warm spots. It goes without saying that they were a great deal of help during the morning writing session.
This is correct. The document is very clear on that point. But here’s more from Anders:
The United States sees it as a strategic priority… that MAGA movements come to power in Europe, and they intend to use the means that they have to support such movements in the fight against the current centrist governments.
These are some very dramatic statements that have raised deep questions about whether there is any foundation for NATO to function going forward if the United States sees it as a strategic priority to undermine the governments of other NATO countries. …
It’s really hard to see how there can be an alliance any more. The reality is that the views expressed in this [policy document] are in many ways identical to the Russian viewpoints on Europe and the Russian goals of regime change in European countries.
He further discusses the document’s demands for ‘free speech,’ in the sense of ending social media moderation and opposing the exclusion of hate speech, the lifeblood of MAGA fascism. There are several demands in the document around these topics, which he sees – correctly – as focused on helping Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg push MAGA/fascist propaganda into Europe through their algorithmically-driven propaganda machines.
Elon Musk’s “X” is the bigger threat, of course. As Nielsen puts it: “If you’re European, then it is a national security priority to stop using X.” Elon Musk bought Twitter to turn it into a fascist propaganda fountain, as opposed to Zuckerberg’s primary intention of making as much money as possible, working with fascists if that’s what gets the job done.
I have, of course, been saying that it’s time to stop using X since a few months into Elon Musk’s takeover of the site because of this exact reason, but, well – who the fuck listens to me?
Anders’s final key takeaway here is that this document doesn’t show a MAGA-led US deciding not to care at all about Europe, but instead shows a US deciding to care very much about Europe – mostly western Europe – with the specific and stated intention of installing MAGA governments, telling Europe that they must be MAGA – fascist – to be allied with the US.
This move would be an extension of what MAGA see as “their” western hemisphere, which other than western Europe means North and South America, including Greenland.
Naturally, this process would include granting Russia and Trump’s second-best pal Putin their own sphere of influence in the east. This portends the US’s impending betrayal of Ukraine, and later, a betrayal of the Baltic states, Poland, probably a couple of others (Moldova? Romania? Bulgaria?) as well.
But why? Does Trump love Putin and Orban that much?
I believe It’s more than that, and more than Trump’s ego, believe it or not. It’s more than his desperate longing to be a dictator and it’s more than his sheer will to steal every dollar in sight. Trump and MAGA, well… they are definitively fools, morons, white nationalists, imperialists, longing for a white imperial past. But I still think that Putin has more choate strategic plans than Trump, and I still think Ukraine is a climate war, so…
…shall I post this line again? Sure, I’ll post this line again. Here’s what I think Putin really wants – not what he’ll get, what he wants. It’s a minimum goal, to “secure” the nation:
That’s oversimplified, of course, but this is a small map and a big thick line. The reality would be far different, and most likely more like existing national boundaries, but still: it gets the idea across.
Meanwhile, when Russian maximalists and propaganda shills talk about how “we should march all the way to Paris” – which they do, repeatedly – here’s what I think they want:
And what do these lines have in common?
Mountains.
Tall, easier to defend, mountainous, migration-blocking borders.
It’s simple-minded in a lot of ways, I suppose, but so is keeping the border at the Rhine and that kept French foreign policy busy for a few centuries, so border politics don’t have to be all that complex.
Putin et al – they know climate change is real. Trump’s a decaying fool and might not know now if he ever did, but Putin? He knows. But heading a petrostate dictatorship with lots of far-northern land? He doesn’t want to stop it, because it’s the outsourced expense of allllllll Russia’s money, and if billions die, well, that’s the cost of doing business.
I call map one Putin’s Wall. Map two? Let’s call it Solovyov’s Wall, since as far as I can tell he’s the most famous proponent of “marching all the way to Paris.” Soloyvov’s Wall isn’t attainable – it won’t happen, it’s (ugh) aspirational – but I do think Trump wants to give Putin his wall, and that Putin has enough trust in Russia’s ability to handle MAGA that he’s willing to let Trump and his replacements handle the west.
Personally, I think MAGA has enough interest in a semi-mythical White Europe that they’re willing to do it. As long as they’re lead by the right – white, fascist – governments.
Hence, this hideous betrayal of a document.
That said, let me be real clear about something: On their own, Russia cannot attain Putin’s Wall. It’d take a complete American betrayal and European capitulation for them to have any chance. They cannot do it alone.
But thanks to MAGA and Trump, they’re on the edge of getting that American betrayal. They want to push that betrayal to completion. If they get it, then they’ll help the US make MAGA happen in Europe, in order to get the second necessary condition of European collapse and capitulation.
Russia’s no match for the EU as a whole. But torn apart? Picking off one little country at a time is… it’s not easy, it’s absolutely not, but they’re willing to kill as many of their own as is necessary for as long as is necessary to do it. Particularly if they’re ethnic minorities. And since nobody wants to flee a climate disaster to a war zone anyway, so he wins either way. Whether deterred by mountains or by war, refugees would go elsewhere, or not at all.
And that’s why I think this is a climate war. Not a war triggered by climate changes in Russia, but by Russia wanting to keep oil and gas going forever and keep out the people that will starve and kill.
You noticed Iran saying that Tehran will have to be abandoned as a capital, didn’t you? It’s more corruption and incompetence than climate change – but it’s a bit of all three. Climate change has moved the timetable. Made things worse. And yet, we’re just getting started.
So, then. Where are we? Ah, yes. How this all plays out.
There’s a bit of a feeling out there that Trump is weakened and even some who think that this nightmare is… more or less over. That Trump is a “lame duck,” that there is no MAGA without him.
That’s partially true. Trump is weakened. MAGA is, too, and they’ve been dependant upon his stardom – and fandom – to reach critical mass. They will be badly wounded – but not out – once he goes.
But none of that means this is over. The more trouble MAGA and Trump think they’re in, the more Trump and MAGA will lash out, trying to push their fascist power fantasies into existence. We will all see more betrayals, more sabotage, more oppression – the ICE army of white supremacists they’re working to summon into existence, funded by the so-called “big beautiful bill,” will actively work to dwarf the violence and abuses we’ve seen this year.
It’s their vision of the future, and they’re going to fight for it. It’s what they want, it’s what they’re all in to get, and it’s what they will do anything to achieve.
And they will not go down quietly. Take heart in the recent massive election shifts. Take heart in Trump’s decay and weakness and failing… opinion polls. Take heart in the America First/MAGA civil war. Take heart in all of it.
But do not, for a moment, think this is actually over.
Sean Duffy wants passengers to dress up for airplane flights, like they used to do in, I guess, the 1950s. OK, I'll do that if the airlines will resume treating passengers as they did then: in the way of diners in fancy restaurants, or passengers on luxury cruises. Then it would be appropriate. As it is now, it would be ludicrous.
He also wants them to exercise while waiting for their flights. In their dress clothes? RFK Jr demonstrated pull-ups while wearing a dress shirt and a tie, so I guess so. Especially from a man who's been known to pose shirtless.
That kind of exercise I wouldn't do, though, however dressed. I have never been able to do a pull-up, not even when I was a scrawny little kid, and I was a scrawny little kid. The other boys in the phys ed class, who could all execute a dozen without breaking a sweat, would stare in disbelief as I strained and strained and was not able to pull my head, let alone my chin, up to the bar.
I was also the slowest runner in the class. I was proud of getting the highest score in the 50-yard dash until I realized what that meant.
And DT wants visitors to the US to declare their social media use. Yet another reason to discourage visitors from coming here. My answer to that one would be a big MYOB. It doesn't say what counts as "social media," and lists I've seen usually don't include blogging platforms. Other than that, I've rarely indulged. I've left occasional comments on YouTube videos. I've been persuaded to get accounts on LinkedIn and Discord, both of which I've found pretty useless. I've never used Facebook or Twitter, but at least I've seen them and know what they are. Most of the rest, the likes of TikTok, Instagram, Pinterest (which I had to extract from a list as names I'd heard before), I've never seen and don't even know what specifically within the realm of social media they do. I may have been told but I can't maintain a memory of something that has no referent for me.
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archangelbeth
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