The eternal, rhythmic challenge of falling out of routine, recognizing that, and then falling back into it. Losing and regaining my routine IS my routine.

If these are the guardrails AI requires, we’re totally screwed.

Taking four months off from writing Lightplay was a necessity—newborns take up all your time!—but it also gave me a chance to re-think what I’m doing. For one, I’m breaking up with Sunday. The new thing: publishing on the full moon. It feels right.

“Email workflow.” You say those two words and you’ve already bored 99% of people. But for me, setting up gmail to auto-load the next message, using the “e” shortcut to archive, using send-and-archive, and switching it to auto-load the next-most-recent message… has markedly improved my life.

I finally put up my essay “Night/Light” up on my website. (It went out in Lightplay last October.) It’s about a night walk, the thin blue line movement, poverty, an old folk tale, reptiles. Mostly it’s about the mystery and fear of not knowing our neighbors. I think it holds up.

Taking four months off from writing Lightplay was a necessity—newborns take up all your time!—but it also gave me a chance to re-think what I’m doing. For one, I’m breaking up with Sunday. The new thing: publishing on the full moon. It feels right.

This disaster where a Koch daughter bought lit world power through founding+bankrolling Catapult, then got bored reminds me of my own early-twenties fantasy of some billionaire benefactor appearing, waving money wand, and unshackling me from capitalism. Nope. Socialism is the way

Slugging is the new goblin mode

Little-known fact: orange wine is just bad rosé

A Chinese balloon! Oh nooooaauuwwrr! They are spying on us with their evil-wrought balloon!

bought a dozen pencils at the bookstore - came home and sharpened them - now my engineering people are all jealous

Struggling to get hooked on the next book I want to read — then, in bath, suddenly engrossed — letting the mystery in.

My dad just told me the rent on his first place out in the country after leaving LA, at the end of Pigeon Point Road in Humboldt: fifty cents a month. 1969-70.

To have been a boomer!

I’m once again thinking of this haiku by Taneda Santōka:

141

busy pulling away

at paddy weeds—

those big balls*

Only enhanced by translator Burton Watson’s asterisk:

*In Santōka’s time, Japanese farmers working in the fields in hot weather often wore only a simple loincloth.

Sometimes the good feelings curdle. Then it’s time for solitude, and for straining emotion through the cheesecloth of contemplation.

To make, uhhh, “mozzarella art”?

Reading that no one knows who exploded sections of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 undersea pipelines, I can’t help but think of the acts of anti-fossil fuel sabotage in KSR’s The Ministry For the Future. Maybe it wasn’t Russia! Maybe the eco-terrorists are finally here!

www.washingtonpost.com/national-…

I’m sorry to report that over on the bird site the you-can-only-read-four-tweets-if-not-logged-in tool seems to have broken again, or been disabled. A pity for a social media junkie like me. Back to visiting individual people’s pages and gobbling up all their tweets.

I’m sorry but scientists have now found “space hurricanes” that are “Over 600 miles in diameter with multiple arms that rotate counterclockwise … contain a calm center, or eye, and ‘rain’ electrons into the upper atmosphere”? If Philip Pullman was crowing when it turned out “dark matter” was real, he ought to have a real field day with this one.

Another capsicin observation: there is a specific, peculiar sensation in your mouth when it is burning with chili and then you take a gulp of very hot coffee. This sensation is for me so distinctive that today when I felt it, my mind whisked me right to my favorite diner, Cafe One, in Noyo, where I always get the huevos rancheros and wash them down with some delicious, half-burnt diner coffee, black.

Samin Nosrat talks about “layering fat” in a dish, for instance by adding goat cheese to a salad that you then dress with olive oil. I am working on a parallel theory of “layering chilis” in my latest bowl of rice and beans, featuring half a grilled poblano, a handful of pickled jalapeños, and a drizzle of habanero hot sauce. It’s working.

Today’s announcement that California scientists finally achieved net-positive nuclear fusion seems like good news for the climate fight. But will this moonshot siphon resources from the actual, workable solutions we already have to hand? (Seems likely.) And worse, even if we do achieve fusion on a wide scale, will the insane engineering and materials requirements of the technology concentrate political power—and electrical power—every more fully in the hands of the already-rich and already-powerful?

To me, one of the most beautiful things about solar as a power source is its decentralized nature. Like the internet, it is a technology that tends toward anarchy and democracy. Fusion on the other hand seems like it will require tremendous amounts of centralized capital and administration.

Here’s my hope: most everyone achieves local energy independence in my lifetime, by way of a few solar panels and the big nuclear reactor in the sky. Then we use fusion to run things like aluminum smelters and data centers.

In this article about a Central Valley police chief’s breathtaking scheme to get rid of the town’s library and instead fill the building with cops, check this passage:

Ah yes, books, children, young mothers—all expendable, all less important than cops.

I read this whole article with my jaw hanging open. Just an incredible condensation of the problem of police nationwide, condensed into one little nightmare.

I do wish the New York Times had pushed back more against the police chief’s framing. At the beginning of the article, they paraphrase him:

His argument: Crime is exploding, the city is growing, the tax base is tight.

Only right near the end of the article do we get anything resembling context, which suggests something much closer to a flat line:

All the while, gang violence has been a growing issue. The city has seen three homicides so far this year — the same number as last year — and all were gang-related, Mr. Williams said. In October, after a series of shootings, including a drive-by in nearby Delano, several McFarland school sporting events were canceled.

That’s sad, especially for the actual people impacted. But is the line really going up, as suggested at the beginning of the article? Are more cops really going to resolve this? The article doesn’t investigate these foundational premises of its reporting.

Even without some necessary context, the story is wild. It reminds me of the bizarre practice of “asset foreiture,” where police have free reign to claim the possessions of people arrested for certain crimes—regardless of whether or not they are eventually convicted.

The cops want that big, airy library. Why not take it? Why spare a thought for the kids studying in it after school, waiting for their farmworker parents? If anything, they’re just going to become criminals. Right?

This War on Cars episode, “Muscle Car City,” explains something I have definitely observed around LA: the dramatic rise in muscle cars driving hyper recklessly on the same streets I push my newborn’s stroller down, and the cops not doing much at all to stop them. Like the best journalism, it leads you to understanding without rapping you over the head with it.

thewaroncars.org/2022/12/0…

I am a pathetic social media addict; the only solution I have found is to never log in anywhere. So restricted, I don’t have a personal “feed.” Instead, all I can do is pull up individual Twitter accounts, and, because I’m not logged in, Twitter locks me out after I look at 4 tweets.

Unfortunately, after the Musky Boys took over Twitter, the tool that blocked me from reading more than 4 tweets either broke or was disabled. Now I could scroll with abandon. And I did! I became a completist for my favorite follows. Found myself losing twenty, thirty, forty minutes every evening, caught in the scroll.

I am happy to report that the only-4-tweets-for-you feature is back! And so I find I have some time on my hands, to do things like actually post my own things, on my blog that no one reads :)