Sumana

Belatedly realized I'd already made a front-page post to MetaFilter recommending a short story that I already recommended to you but without much fanfare! So I'll post here what I was gonna say there:

"Subject: 'Became a zombie' Life Event"

From 2013: "Feature Development for Social Networking" by Benjamin Rosenbaum, an epistolary zombie story set at a tech platform, exploring "how fantastical tropes might alter a familiar technology that many of us use every day". Tracy: "We decided AGAINST making it a Life Event! The point is to be able to tag other people as zombies. If you can log in to update your own status, you’re not a zombie, am I right?" Floyd: "There is a 24-hour incubation period, so you could set it in advance of symptom onset."

My spouse and I are watching season 6 of The Dragon Prince right now and I find it likely my frequent complaints are reducing his enjoyment so I will instead summarize them here

(we just watched episode 2)

Nearly none of these people are managing communication or projects or security appropriately

including those who are not actual children

recently my partner pointed out that Soren was the person making the most reasonable decisions

Ask clarifying questions! Take a second person with you to do a dangerous thing! Listen to what other people are trying to tell you! Consider that beyond "leave me entirely" and "stay at my side" may be a compromise alternative such as "be nearby"!

that sort of thing

genre expectations, yeah, it's a kids' show, yeah

so annoying

If you live someplace where there is a regular place a lot of people go on weekends, like a farmer's market or a popular park, maybe there is something of a fringe or liminal area where sometimes people set up folding tables and sell stuff or campaign. Girl Scout cookies, petition signings, and so on.

If you are in the US and you want to meet likeminded neighbors because of the recent election results, and you think there are some of those in your neighborhood, you could drag a little folding table and folding/camp chair out to that spot this weekend, with a paper sign.

I did this the past 2 weekends. One sign just said "Worried about the election? Me too". The other said "Vent about the election; Plan for Jan. 20th". The second time I went, I brought a second chair, so I could invite someone to sit down for a moment to talk, and I brought a few books on politics or organizing that I am finding helpful.

I have now had like 15? 20? meaningful conversations with neighbors I didn't know before.

I also brought bits of paper with my Signal username and the Signal logo and a note to go to Signal.org to download the app. I'm messaging with a few people I met. And two of them have told me about new local efforts I can join.

Sometimes I wore an N95 mask, sometimes I didn't. I don't remember whether fewer people approached me when I did that.

Yeah, maybe 2-3 of the conversations were frustrating in ways that felt handle-able -- a 15-second chat with someone who's glad about the election results, a 10-minute chat with an immigrant who disagreed with my priorities and approach but not SUPER rudely (and he definitely had a point or two that I am mulling over), a 10-minute chat with a person who thinks her own life is pretty unlikely to be affected by what's coming and kept returning to the topic of the Democrats' flaws.

But those experiences were far outweighed by the substantive and useful conversations I've had and the connections I've made. What are some likely risks? What specific things can our households do to prepare? What specific actions can we press our local and state governments to do to mitigate risks to us? And, emotionally, finding someone in person who also feels some mix of scared/wary/angry/sad/determined/grimly laughing/tender and sharing our spirit with them.

Heads-up that you could potentially do this too.

I'm running a fundraiser for the Election Protection Hotline, 1-866-OUR-VOTE. No matter your position on the 2024 US election, I'm guessing you want the votes counted fairly. So I'm trying to raise USD $25,000 for Election Protection.

Not a US resident or US citizen? Hate all the major parties? No problem! You'd be donating to The Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, a nonpartisan US nonprofit founded in 1963, which houses the Election Protection Coalition. Anyone, anywhere in the world, can donate.

Then, on Saturday Oct. 26th, expect 8 minutes of nerd jokes about open source software and how programming skews your brain, and none about politics. (Only 8 minutes because that's as long as a stand-up meeting should be.)

Please donate, and spread the word!

(Mastodon/Fediverse, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Twitter. Here's a square image for groupchats/Instagram.)

Kamala Harris's campaign sent out a press release saying, among other things,

That phrasing, with the question mark, is (per Gretchen McCulloch, internet linguistics expert), reads as more internet-y than we usually get from US Presidential candidates:
I'm also struck by the informality of "this guy" and the choice of a comma rather than a colon for "we only have one question, is Donald Trump ok?"

The "quite weird?" line has struck a chord with some folks (examples from Bluesky):


And some folks are thinking about the usefulness of the subjective word "weird", and its splash zone.


and


response:


I'm late getting ready for my day, but I want to mark how useful the intersubjective derogatory power of "weird" is. It's like "creep" or (per this Black programmer's experience) saying something is "uncomfortable". It's easy for a person with structural power to use "this makes people uncomfortable" to deflect accountability for a decision. But also the subjectivity of "uncomfortable" is why it has extra power for marginalized people, as Erynn Brook discussed on Twitter a while back.

I am not making the time right now to think about this in more detail, but, it's interesting.

The 1980s action movie Streets of Fire is, in the US, up on YouTube in its entirety to watch free-with-ads right now. Saw it last night.

A few thoughts:

It's infernokrusher. It's pretty. It kind of reminds us of Dark City, Batman: The Animated Series, and Brazil in how it synthesizes a stylized 20th century urban aesthetic that sort of is unmoored in time. And it's a MOVIE, visual and sonic spectacle. According to the English Wikipedia article, one co-screenwriter said that the director/co-writer wanted a comic book movie but wasn't satisfied with any existing comic book to base the film on, so it's like a comic book movie, and the director said:


What more do you need in a trailer? Although the trailer itself is also fun, and perhaps helps illustrate my belief that Streets of Fire could fit somewhere in the Mad Max franchise without a ton of changes.

Spouse and I, fairly early in the runtime, started suspecting that the character of McCoy had originally been written as a man, then genderswapped -- so much so that, at one point, Leonard forgot the character's name and called her Starbuck. We were right. According to IMDb trivia, originally the filmmakers had Edward James Olmos in mind!

What a treat to see Rick Moranis playing someone so loathsome, given how I grew up on his Honey, I Shrunk The Kids character. (Also, that's a marvelous title.) Also, funny how Willem Defoe's Raven is the actual threat and does dangerous and reprehensible things, but we have way more screentime of Billy (Moranis's character) just being incredibly irritating.

More elevated municipal rail than I had expected -- not just as stanchions that serve as obstacles during car chases, but also as a relevant mode of transport.

Spoiler for the ending: I ( spoiler )

Thank you Jim Steinman for those opening and closing songs - in his obituary I read the deathless quote  "If you don't go over the top, you can't see what's on the other side," which is the essence of infernokrusher.

A fun ride.

(via Dr. Damien P. Williams on Bluesky; I have not checked the cited source, which is a video of a live conversation)

in 2010, in a conversation at Open Source Bridge, Jim Blandy mused aloud,

I mentioned that just now in the Fediverse and a friend replied with:


And I'm thinking about Huckleberry Finn, specifically:

"All right, then, I'll GO to hell"--and tore it up.

As I wrote a few years ago: The nuance I still ponder is: Huck doesn't say his way is right. He decides he's wrong but he's going to do it anyway. He decides to be a hypocrite. He does not see himself as articulating a new consistent ethical framework under which he is morally right; he is accepting the status and the consequences of his actions in the religious framework everyone's taught him, but he decides not to let that get in the way of what he feels compelled to do. It's a different kind of resistance.
I heard an echo of this moment in "The Rundown Job" (Leverage, S05E09), when a government official tries to get Eliot, who used to do wetwork, to leave the Robin Hood-type vigilante outfit he's with now:

Colonel Vance: The world can always use more good guys.
Eliot: Yeah, well, too bad we're the bad guys.

And, relatedly, N.K. Jemisin's "Cold-Blooded Necessity".So much of maturation, for me, is about accepting things about me that just aren't going to change no matter what the jerk voices in my head want to shame me about. And that's all tied up with self-confidence and self-worth.

I'm noting down here a few of the bits of compass that help me realign myself when things get foggy.

From Emily McCombs in a Slate advice column last year:


From Frowner on Ask MetaFilter ten years ago:


And I can't find this bit right now, but I remember a blog post where a guy mentioned that his usual order at a particular restaurant was such-and-such main dish, because "I like the potatoes it comes with." Which has stuck with me as a metaphor for doing something because you want a side effect that indirectly comes along with it, rather than intentionally and directly choosing the thing you want.