Weekend

Sun, 15 Feb 2026 18:08:24 GMT

I’ve been chickening out and trying to avoid reading online discussions about the shooting in BC—IYKYK.

Touch wood, but I think our apartment may be in remission from the Unpleasantness.

Andrew and I don’t really do Valentine’s Day, but e came with me to the mall yesterday—I needed to buy a broom and some groceries—and we had slushy fruit drinks and bought a small toy for the cats in the shape of an ice-cream cone. It seems to have gone over well.

Finished reading Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Children of Ruin, the sequel to Children of Time and just as enjoyable. Except for Dr. Avrana Kern, this one features a whole new cast of characters: humans, spiders, Humans, octopus, AIs based on humans, and one of the more frightening alien entities ever written, Us-of-We. Does Tchaikovsky count as hopepunk? He should: despite the many grim and horrifying things that happen in these books, they’re touchingly optimistic that peace, or at least detente, is possible if all sides can just communicate.

I did feel like most of the octopus characters were a bit underwritten, but that’s partly because it’s a plot point that their minds are even more different from human minds than the spiders’ are. That said, the scene in which the octopus flickers in response to Senkovi’s corny jokes, even though it doesn’t understand them, because it’s happy that he’s happy that he’s happy, is both touching and also a clue that they respond primarily to the emotional content of a statement. Sort of like how I’m told this song is a collaboration between Poland’s two best-known folk-punk groups/artists, and while I don’t understand the words, the tune is very catchy.

Other musical links: I’d heard of Viv Stanshall’s album Men Opening Umbrellas Ahead, but I’d never listened to it till this week, and it’s incredible—imagine if Eric Idle and Tom Waits got drunk together in a dive bar in Lagos.

Also—this M. R. James-esque report from the BBC on an apparent case of black magic.

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Twists of Memory

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 23:22:22 GMT

Over on Wonkette, the following story is currently under discussion:

Attorney Lin Wood made his name by representing Richard Jewell in his defamation cases against the media and the US government. If you knew who Wood was before last week, it's either because of that or because he also represented JonBenet Ramsey's parents and brother in their respective defamation cases. ….
Earlier this week, Wood was blocked from attempting to raise money for Rittenhouse's defense on Twitter. Both Facebook and Twitter banned praise of Rittenhouse's actions last week, and Discover has prohibited users from donating to his defense fund.
Today, Wood posted a very weird tweet claiming that in 1996 "Mark Zuckerberg & Facebook declared Richard Jewell to be a mass murderer," and that "efforts to raise money for Jewell's defense & family were banned on social media."

According to the Wonkette article, Wood subsequently claimed his tweet was a satire, or an allegory, or something, but that numerous right-wingers were already denouncing Zuckerberg for his terrible slander of Jewell back in 1996 when Facebook didn’t yet exist and Zuckerberg was in middle-school.

Anyway my reaction was to sigh and shrug, not because of the wrongness or the politics but because false memories and the Mandela Effect and traditions that, having once taken root, get their origin stories backdated several centuries, all seem to be pretty common. Debunking stories is an endless treadmill. Which led me to remember a book about the Indian Rope Trick.
( Read more... )

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Stuff and Moonshine

Weekend

Twists of Memory