Thursday, February 06, 2025

Three Interesting Things

1.  A bear (that the headline claims was fat, which seem not relevant) was hanging out underneath someone's house when they returned after the fire. 
2. Rebecca Solnit wrote about how fighting for justice can be small acts
3. I'm guilty of the music or TV as white noise thing, but this article talks about how silence can be useful

Monday, February 03, 2025

Joy Doesn't Have to be Ignorant

People talk about being blissfully ignorant. And so I think there is a temptation to believe that being happy when terrible things are happening must mean you are ignoring them. Except I can be informed and happy. When we talk about things like hope being a discipline (to paraphrase Mariame Kaba) it means that you have to work at being hopeful. 
As a teen someone told me when I was upset about something that I could just choose to be happy. And oooh, that felt like being told to calm down. To choose happiness.
But perhaps, what that adult was (badly) trying to say to me is that there will often be terrible things, injustices, and unfairness. Some of them will be things I can help with or plug into in some way. And some of them will not.  But I also needed to make space to find joy. Because without the ability to find some joy I was going to flame out and also things would still be unfair or terrible. 
It is hard when several of my communities are being attacked. My hyper vigilance wants to watch. But I also need to eat food that makes me feel good, and read stories about people flirting and baking. 
To pick climate change as an example me watching how many hottest days we have, refreshing temperatures, scrolling flood stories, it won't change things. I can't will climate change to slow. (Rude but true.) I can, of course, do my part. And I can stay abreast of the changes. Lobby for more.  But if I never go walk through the park, or admire the sky, what even was all that worry for? 

Thursday, January 30, 2025

Three Interesting Things

1. The cold weather created pancake ice in part of the river here. 
2. The war Israel is waging is also halting conservation work
3.
There is a kidlit for Los Angeles auction.  I know there have been a lot of auctions lately.  But there is a lot of need. 

Monday, January 27, 2025

2024 Reading Tally

I love data.  I've been doing the reading tally for a bit.  Here's last years, which links to the prior year's and so on. 
Last year I had a really good reading year and in some way's such a crazy number made this year kind of a relief.  It would be so much work to meet last year's and honestly, I didn't even want to.  I didn't want to set a new personal record, I wanted to let that one stand and think, yeah, that one time I did that.  I also wanted to try to make more time for things like TV that had been sorely neglected.  I did a little of that. 
Anyway, the data. 
Read: 224
DNF'd: 22
211 authors, 116 of them were new to me.  
The oldest title was from 2007.  Though I did read a graphic novel of A Wrinkle in Time, and the original IP on that is older than that.  (4 of the titles were from 2024. 
Most read author was Jill Shalvis, though Sandra Brown and Charish Reid were both not too far behind. 
Highest reading month was May with 29. 
36 were audiobooks. 158 were library books, because libraries are awesome.  14 were from Kobo Plus.
It was a good year of reading.  Hoping to maybe get more audiobooks this year. 

Tuesday, January 21, 2025

The Refugees of the Data Empire

I forget who I first saw saying that data is the new Empire, but yes. Data about is is the most important thing to corporations these days. It's why stores have begun collecting too much data. Target's data breach was in part because they were storing PINs, which have no legal use for them, but were of course very valuable to people to steal. 
I recently had to politely refuse to share my phone number multiple times to complete an in person transaction in a brick and mortar store. I was assured they would not call me, but "needed" the info to complete my transaction. They did not need my phone number and I did complete my transaction. The phone number just helps them better cross reference me with other purchase data so they can attempt to market to me more specifically. 
I have abandoned some social media platforms. Watched some destroyed, disappeared, or pivoted in a new direction that destroys all the things that used to make it interesting. And with the brief TikTok ban going into place in the US, we have another wave of people trying to gather up their followings, and find a new place to gather and reconnect. 
TikTok still exists, of course. The US isn't even the first country to ban it. (Possibly first to unban it.) But I've been listening to Rebecca Nagle's By the Fire We Carry, and was reminded that while possibly with less active death, there is tons of precedent for this. Precedent for the US deciding it deserves things that others had. That other people were in the way of their stated goals. That people the US didn't much care for having a space to gather was a threat. That the rules the US itself had established, didn't have to apply when dealing with people in their way. That rasing the spector of scary brown people is justification for anything. 
Sure, no one's being force marched through the snow. But as an alum of multiple online communities, there are people I've never found again. Who I likely never will. 
I was only a lurker on TikTok, but I know people who were running their small businesses there. It is a loss for our freedoms to gather and speak where we wish. And it is a loss for people who's salaries were dependent on it. 
I wish I believed my government cared about safeguarding my data, but the number of data breaches I've been notified of leads me to believe it is not a top priority. 
I'll be keeping an eye out for the Lorax Musical Concept Album. Just the kind of fun weird nerdy stuff my little corner of TikTok was into. 

*Note: I know TikTok is technically back now. But I deleted the app.