djkittycat

 Barely making headlines yesterday was the announcement that governments have failed once again to meet climate targets. As Hurricane Melissa barrels towards Jamaica, threatening to do catastrophic damage, it's important to remember that these governments had a choice, that we as so-called Western civilization had a choice, and we chose wrong every single time.

The thing you may not have heard of at all was the announcement yesterday of the extinction of the Christmas Island shrew. This little animal was a victim of an even older human-caused catastrophe, the colonization of Australia and its surrounding islands by first Britain, then Japan. The invasion of Europeans introduced black rats to the island, which in turn introduced a parasite that wiped out most of the population. 

With so many other horrors, including the continuing horrors perpetrated by colonialism, take a moment to grieve for this tiny, innocent creature, which was a unique being that in our carelessness and cruelty, we destroyed. Just another beautiful life lost to the gaping maw of capitalism. The people in charge think that they can cheat death by colonizing Mars or uploading their brains into a god-machine but there won't be any little shrews there, and also their fantasies are impossible. There is only this world and we're shitting it up like we have a spare one stashed somewhere.

The Legendary Pink Dots were a 3-piece band tonight. Once you removed Ka-Spel, the remaining two musicians formed "Orbital Service", which turns out played better LPD-style material than when Ka-Spel sang with them. LPD were also good, but nowhere as good as on some of their albums.

Showing how far down they've come, they were playing at the Dance Cave rather than Lee's.

I faithfully go to the Kensington Festival of Lights every year, but I haven't been to its darker, spookier, sister festival, the Night of Dread, in forever. It's run by Clay and Paper out of Dufferin Grove Park (for non-Torontonians, this is one of the best parks in the city, though in recent years it has fallen victim to violent encampment sweeps over the protests of nearly everyone who uses it).



( what lies within? )

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

Hey you. Want to volunteer for a Feminist Inclusive Convention?

https://wiscon.net/volunteer/concom/

#WisConCommunity #WisCon #WisCon2026 #FeministSFF #Volunteer

Today's featured episode is "Smart Glasses Are Ushering In an Anti-Social World ft. Chris Gilliard" from Tech Won't Save Us.

This is a good episode for a number of reasons. First of all, it reminds us that just because tech companies want a thing, and invest a lot of money to convince you that this thing is the inevitable progression of humanity, you can as an individual reject that thing and convince others to do so too. Google Glasses are a great example of a thing that was heavily pushed but no one other than glassholes wanted it, and so people were shamed, mocked, and bullied out of public spaces for wearing them. This is a good use of shame, bullying, and mockery. (Note: Chris points out that the latest attempt at making glasses that control you happen is a bit different, as it's being aimed at controlling workers rather than as a status symbol for the rich. Obviously, do not bully an Amazon delivery guy for being forced to wear them.) Another great comparison is the Metaverse—Zuck spent a fortune on his fantasy of not having a body that sweats too much, and no one bought it. No one asked for LLMs and you—yes you, one person who thinks you're too insignificant to do anything—can stop them from being forced on you. We finally get to use our mean girl powers for good, and I have a mean streak a mile wide.

Another thing that kind of blew my mind is the way Chris talks about the phases of Big Tech-driven media—first it was used to connect you to your friends (and make you dependent), then it was about a trade where the companies gave you connection and visibility in exchange for privacy, and now the deal has shifted. You are expected to be controlled by the technology. You are now being programmed and instructed. Chris notes that some people very much desire this as it reduces decision fatigue. Of course this dovetails nicely with the broader move towards fascism in former Western democracies.

Finally, there is some good talk about affordances. An affordance is basically what the environment or technology allows you to do. A button allows you to press it. A car not only allows you to go faster than you could otherwise, but it creates physical and geographic isolation, the development of suburban spaces around roads rather than common areas, and reactionary politics caused by mistrusting your neighbour and especially Those People In Cities. The replacement of Dreamwidth-style fixed-page scrolling on most social media sites by endless scrolling is what enables social media dependency and doomscrolling. Etc. Chris talks about what, specifically, LLMs are designed to do as their ideal use-case, which is forcing your worldview on someone else. They are primarily for deepfakes, stalking, propaganda, and CSAM. That you can do other things with them is a side-effect. I think this is a very strong argument and not one I'd really thought about. The characterization of LLMs as an inherently antisocial technology is not one I'd thought much about either.

Never forget that our billionaire enemies are forcing LLMs into everything because they want girlfriends without having to talk to women, they want slaves without having to see a Black person, and they have a fantasy of immorality via being uploaded into Machine Heaven. This is fundamentally silly and risible and actually batshit insane, and you are smarter and more reality-based than they are.

Some of my local ant!fa friends help with a soup kitchen run out of the local Anglican church run by the most anarchist pastor you'll ever meet. Since I'm not working, I offered to help with their late night dumpster diving raids. We got in a car, drove to the northern suburbs, checked out the bins for 5 different supermarkets, and ended up with SO MANY CROISSANTS (not nice ones, but industrial crap), tons of lettuce, 20 huge pineapples (!!!). Not a balanced selection but they'll be buying other ingredients as well. This is a good way to stay out of trouble.

Oh, I haven't done this in a while. I've been reading a liiiittle bit though.

I Don't Want to Talk About It, by Terry Real. This is the book of his that I really needed to read. He talks about the gendered expression of depression, how men often have covert depression which is hidden by hidden behaviour, such as addiction (substances, sex, etc), overwork, grandiosity, aggressivity, etc. He talks a bit about love addiction and I'm curious about that one. I'm still just halfway in.

Le capital, par Karl Marx. My friend Corvin, who is über smart, has decided to rope a bunch of his friends into a Capital reading group. I don't belong in this group at all. At least two of the people are university professors, including one who I have huge respect for. One of my great comrades who I think *might* have a masters but not a PhD is in the group, but she has been on the editorial collective of one of the most important radical publications in this city for over a decade, so she's way better read than me. A new arrival in the group is a Hegelian. I'm assuming he has a PhD, like I think Corvin does.

I knew that Corvin read German, but now I've learned that his father did speak it natively, so that somewhat explains that part of his knowledge. One of the profs also reads German. Corvin asked me if I would read it in French, since that would bring a different perspective. At first I didn't want to, because I do 95% of my radical/political reading in English, and I would have to translate my thoughts back and forth when discussing with the others... ugh. But I did a bit of research anyway. I learned that Marx had personally supervised the translation of the book to French, making significant editorial changes. In the end Marx called the French version the most accessible, and said that even if someone had read it in German, it would be worth their time reading the French version too (as one does) since it contains some extra innovations. Apparently people in Trier, where Marx was born, were often fluent French speakers if they had some education, so Marx would know what he was reading when supervising the work. So anyway. We've had two meetings so far but scheduling has been hell. I canceled the pilates class (!) I had registered to to make things easier. We're still on the first chapter of the first section, which is very abstract. Amusingly, people say that this section makes more sense once you've made it all the way through Volume 3. So anyway, I'm reading the French version, even though I still have to do a bit of on-the-fly translation when discussion the book. The others, when they're not peeking at the German version, are reading the brand new translation by Paul Reiter, which is being roundly lauded.

One thing that's great is that Corvin has found a number of ancillary texts and explainers, and we have a large PDF folder to consult from. But of course, other than buy a copy of one of the main support books, I'm barely keeping up. We'll see what happens!

Per the Oaklandside:

Major federal immigration operation will begin tomorrow in the Bay Area

What it says on the tin.  They're staging out at Coast Guard Island in Alameda (that only has one way off of it, BTW).  I sat in on an emergency call with Bay Resistance and there will be some folks out there tomorrow morning.  Not sure what the action is going to be.  Organizations here have been collectively organizing for months so we'll see how it all shakes out. Oakland, the city council and Mayor Barbara Lee are pretty firm in how we collectively feel about this.

Unfortunately, San Francisco has Daniel Lurie as mayor and a bunch of feckless tech bros who think they want Feds in the street but are just now realizing that they have miscalculated with their bullshit (looking at you, Mark Benioff. YOU DON'T EVEN LIVE HERE ANYMORE).

In any case, I have the rapid response numbers on my phone, directions on how to document ICE activities (don't depend it on your phone. It is recommended that folks write information down) and a lot of crankiness. Moreso than my usual level.

Bay Resistance has a Get Ready page with ways to get involved.  Do what you can, where you can.

I am worried. I am worried for Shirley and her staff at the restaurant, for all us out and about on our bikes and walking and living. However, i take heart from New York's response as well as other cities.  The orange fucker is trying to speed run this and the cracks are there.

Just finished: Nothin'.

Currently reading: The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults by Cheryl B. Klein. I haven't made a lot of progress here. It's quite a good, thoughtfully written craft book, with a lot of emphasis on revision, which I like. I.e., write your story first, then work on teasing out the structure in themes in the second draft, which is how I work. There is quite a bit on Harry Potter, unfortunately, but also a number of other examples of interesting-sounding books.

Like most well-written craft books, it's really more literary analysis than a how-to, but I do enjoy her use of literary analysis as a tool for revision and strengthening.

DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

Rice cooker with soup/porridge/congee setting a game changer for rice pudding.

It keeps it simmering juust at boiling point so it cooks covered and unwatched without making a big bubbly mess.

I got a Panasonic 8 cup Rice and Multicooker because it was the cheapest smallest one I could find with that kind of setting. It cooked 1 cup of rice + 2 cups oat milk as pudding without trouble, but I'll have to see if it copes with a single cup of regular rice.

 Oh right, this.

Go listen to Wizards & Spaceships' "WITCHES!" Which witch is the best witch? Which witch tropes are wired and which are inspired. Plus a blatant ripoff of Margaret Killjoy's excellent podcasts about the witch trials.

Witches, bitches!

I broke my pinky nail, just the nail, but not the hardened gel it's covered with. Every time I touch the nail it hurts like fuck. I need to go back to the nail worker/technician to get the gel buffed out. Then she'll trim, and maybe we'll put an extension on top? This is weird and new.

Just finished: Girls Against God by Jenny Hval. I really don't know what to make of it. It's one of those very cool concepts—body horror! time travel! art! black metal! feminism!—that fails somewhat in execution but fails in interesting ways. It's divided into three parts, the first being a stream-of-consciousness rant by a girl who joins a Norwegian black metal band/aspiring witches coven a few years too late, after the scene has fallen apart, and her desire to rebel against the patriarchy and religion. By the end of the first section I had gone from "well, this is how teenage girls sound, this is how I sounded when I was a teenager" to vaguely annoyed. But then the second two, which are hallucinogenic body horror fever dreams, absolutely whip. I wanted the whole book to be like that.

Currently reading: The Magic Words: Writing Great Books for Children and Young Adults by Cheryl B. Klein. Why am I reading a book about writing YA when I have no desire to ever write YA, and knowing the thoughts of teenagers is something I strongly feel I should not have to do without financial compensation? Well, because I got into a discussion with another writer about craft books, and how I don't normally read them, and he recommended this and another one to change my mind about craft books. And also because I seem to have written myself into a situation where I have a teenage POV character, and despite being surrounded by kids all day, writing as one is a whole different ballgame.

So far it's pretty good—I rather like the brainstorming exercises at the end of each section, and the respect that the author has for really good children's/YA fiction (which does, of course, exist, and there's probably even more of it than when I was young, but I wasn't particularly interested in reading about teenagers when I was a teenager). It's 2017 though, so there's a lot more praise for a certain Formerly Beloved Children's Author than she deserves, so if you're going to read it, be warned.