incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

This morning, I woke up 90 minutes before my alarm and struggled to go back to sleep. When my alarm went off, I actually thought I hadn't succeeded . . . before it dawned on me that I had not, in fact, just come back from taking the Pip to see Avengers: Endgame.

In my dream, by the way, I fell asleep in the theater with my eyes open (parallelism!) and, while the Pip was in the bathroom afterward, was asking all the cosplayers what happened. None of them could remember either and were quite disgusted about it. I had to ask the Pip, who told me that squirrels and dogs teamed up to keep Thanos still. (And yes, naturally I tagged the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl on Twitter in the abbreviated version of this story.)

---

One other kid anecdote originally on Twitter:

SteelyKid wanted to fill out a NCAA Men's Basketball bracket because some friends of hers had, and of course what SteelyKid does, the Pip also wants to do. But I made the mistake of telling him that I'd gotten degrees from Yale and Northeastern . . . so he had them meet in the final because, "Mom! I made you win either way!"

This was incredibly sweet but they were 13 and 14 seeds so they went out on the first day.

(I don't think if he's asked about it since, so I expect he's not that invested in it. But he should have gone with one of Chad's teams, Maryland made it to the second round. (The rest of his Final Four was Old Dominion, because it sounded cool, and Vermont, because he had a nice weekend there once. Those were also both double-digit seeds and went out in the first round.))

---

And a dog picture: Charlie pupper is an extremely innocent dog who is certainly not lying on anything he shouldn't be.

---

Links:

• A story of a jar of bees left in a bookshop.

• In which Zen Cho is interviewed by her husband and ought to give us that salty take she's saving for another day:

  Most of the SFF about Empire is about fighting Empire—I think because most SFF is and was produced by white Westerners who are working through their undigested feelings about benefiting from imperial domination by writing stories where they imagine themselves into the position of the oppressed. But that’s a salty take for another day!

• I never liked having human cultures in natural history museums, so I'm glad that the American Museum of Natural History is revising its exhibits.

• It was, according to someone-or-other, National Puppy Day yesterday! The Atlantic collected photos.

---

Finally, I had been trying the podcast Placing Faces because I like how-the-sausage-gets-made podcasts and casting directors seemed like a good topic for that. And the first episode was really great, though the host could have worked a little more not to step on the interview subject's toes. ( and then, ableism )

I popped into /r/CrossStitch and found it consumed with talk about Target bags? Turns out the dollar bins at the entrance to stores are selling various bags of perforated faux-leather and the cross-stitching community spotted them. SteelyKid and I had to go to Target for something else, so we grabbed a few small makeup bags; she immediately decided that she was going to stitch one as a watermelon slice and spent a happy while last night marking up the pattern template a Redditor made and going through my floss stash to pick colors. She's chosen a full-coverage design, so we'll see whether she actually finishes the stitching, but if she doesn't I will. (I think I'm going to try and do a Captain Marvel symbol on one of mine.)

Other links:

• The NYT on how museums decide what to get rid of.

• Carvell Wallace profiles Samuel L. Jackson:

  This becomes clear to me when I later interview him in the country-club restaurant and he sprinkles n-words and motherfuckers about the dining area like handfuls of glitter as Grandpa- and Memaw-type club members look awkwardly into their eggs Benedict. He behaves not only like a man who belongs here but also like one who basically owns the place. His casual inattention to the perceived authority of white power structures is so deeply woven into his way of being that in his presence it seems bizarre that anyone, anywhere, would think to behave differently. A lot of people like to say they don’t give a fuck. Samuel L. Jackson simply doesn’t.

  (Both the above via Go Fug Yourself.)

• Chad took this two-second gif of a giant crane chomping a campus building, which just really amuses me.

• This story about the oldest American picture book still in print is a journey. (Via Tom+Lorenzo.)

Links:

• “Closer To Fine” At 30: The Legacy Of Indigo Girls’ Spellbinding Singalong via Clever Manka.

• The University of Illinois Extension's Stain Solutions database is so useful.

Also, I use Quicken Desktop so I can put our upcoming bills in and make sure we have enough money for them (also remind me of recurring bills), but Quicken 2017 has recently stopped syncing and instead of upgrading, I thought I'd try Mint, because honestly the desktop program has always been kind of frustrating and I hate that they've gone to a subscription model. Except Mint . . . doesn't seem to do that? And it definitely doesn't let you reconcile an account, which is just nonsense.

Does anyone have a Windows or online accounting program that they like and that will do these very simple things?

(Edit: I just got Quicken to work again, but I'll take recs anyway fwiw.)

I have posts I want to write but I'm solo parenting this week and didn't feel good last night so must sleep. Sleeeeeep.

(Though upon opening up the draft email where I accumulate things, there is a tiny bit of prose.)

Links:

• Atlas Obscura, When Gorgeous Architectural Landmarks Are Also Monuments to Fascism, about the city of Asmara in Eritrea, about which I have feelings too complicated and unformed to inflict upon you all.

• The NY Times, How the N.Y. Public Library Fills Its Shelves (and Why Some Books Don’t Make the Cut). Request those books!

• It's the Iditarod, so I was listening to Iditapod (h/t cofax7), and its mention of the long indigenous history of dog mushing made me wonder how many Native mushers there were now. Very shortly thereafter, I came across an article on Twitter talking about that very question, so that was handy: Indian Country Today, After 1,000-mile practice run, Martin Apayauq Reitan is rookie to watch in 2019 Iditarod, profiling him and mentioning four other Native mushers. (And hey, one of those, Ryan Redington, is the one who Chad & the kids met when they did a sled dog excursion off their Alaska cruise last summer.)

• Gizmodo, Delete Never: The Digital Hoarders Who Collect Tumblrs, Medieval Manuscripts, and Terabytes of Text Files. The article, in a broad sense, speaks to me, as I contemplate the mass of stuff in my G+ exports, which has a small but non-zero amount of worthwhile stuff among the ephemeral nonsense, and also contemplate moving this DW to a self-hosted blog that I crosspost.

  (Recently I started tagging stuff in GMail as aa-age-out, and every so often I run a search to find anything with that tag older than a year, which I then delete; this probably doesn't have much effect since I wasn't actually close to my GMail storage quota, but psychologically it's nice not to have old PTO emails and suchlike in there.)

• Do you have weird local government closures? A friend mentioned Chicago's Pulaski Day. That reminded me of Evacuation Day, which is the same day as St. Patrick's Day, which I'm sure has nothing at all to do with why we got it off in Eastern Massachusetts.

• I dug up this fan comic about Spider-man enthusing about Cowboy Bebop after seeing tithenai mention starting the show, because earworm. Content note: opens on a scene of street harassment.

In non-links news, I tag all my ebooks with genre to help me find things, but why don't I also tag them with things "extremely distinctive first-person narration" to really help me find what I'm in the mood for? Grr. (One of the things I want to be writing is about Ann Leckie's The Raven Tower.)

Finally, elsewhere a friend mentioned Crazy Rich Asians and Ralph Breaks the Internet in conjunction, and I was amused to realize that they both made me think about consumerism, probably in an unintentional way (I deliberately did not actually watch Ralph, just listened while I played games on my phone in the theater, because giving it my undivided attention would have mostly made me think about Disney's cultural dominance), and both had a female character I had a bit of a crush on (Astrid; the racer voiced by Gal Gadot). I suppose you can add in a third thing, that the emotional beats all worked and were solid in both, as long as you could roll with the consumerism.

We visited my mom and her husband in Florida! It was a bit warmer than usual, mid-80s; their pool was about 70F, so the kids and Chad had a blast and I watched from the side, as usual. We took an airboat tour of the Everglades and saw little dolphins super-close; found shark teeth and shells and dogs on the beach; and generally had a nice unstressful vacation. (The air travel was not the greatest, but we didn't have to stay overnight in an airport hotel like we did coming back from our New Year's trip, so hey.)

---

A couple links:

• jhameia said that this Atlantic article on college-admissions "rigging" angst was "an amazing, compassionate, and productive response to white people anxieties about missing out on what they think they're entitled to," and I agree.

• At Hyperallergic, The Clandestine Cultural Knowledge of Ancient Graffiti.

---

Because G+ is shutting down, my community there is testing other social media platforms, and we've moved on to federated/distributed ones. I have a Hubzilla account on an experimental fannish instance, and also a Mastodon account that I haven't started using yet but will soon, probably. If you've got a compatible account, feel free to add me/let me know!

(I really like the idea of Hubzilla and I want someone to make a turnkey install so that I can host my own, a la WordPress, which seems vastly unlikely at the moment, alas.)

---

Links:

• On why Baby It’s Cold Outside discourse is the same as Macbeth discourse, with bonus pastiche.

• This is from December, but just in case you missed it: a very short Murderbot story, over at Wired.

  (I was reminded of it by Jonathan Strahan's reading roundup at Locus, which I admit I mostly clicked on because its title was a Paul Simon quote. It's too bad that because it was written first for print, it doesn't hyperlink the many many online stories that it recommends, but this is what highlight + right-click/long-press + search is for.)

• I'm behind on Brooklyn Nine Nine, but I have a deadline to catch up: March 7, when Lin-Manuel Miranda will be guest-starring.

• Adult animated TV versions of MODOK, Hit-Monkey, Tigra & Dazzler, and Howard the Duck, really, that's what you green-light, Marvel? Really?

• This pangolin breaking a wall looks exactly like a tiny dragon and it's very pleasing.

• The Opportunity rover completing its mission reminds me of this older Tumblr post about Curiosity singing Happy Birthday to itself, which always makes me sniffly.

  Edit: and a lovely double-drabble from lannamichaels on the same subject.

---

skygiants had a dream that "Will Scott, in the Lymond Chronicles, was just a pet rock that Francis had hallucinated was a human being," and now all I want to do is think of other works that would be improved by, or at least lend themselves to, characters actually being pet rocks.

Here's what I've got so far:

• Draco Malfoy, imagined by Harry;
• Moby Dick, imagined by Ahab? (I haven't read it);
• Appa, imagined by Aang; and
• take your pick of Steven Universe spoilers, and not only for the terrible pun.

What else?

(I did not realize until now that 3/4 of that list are not actually, uhh, human beings; but I think it's within the spirit of the thing.)

---

I feel personally attacked by this Liz Climo comic.

---

The post-dinner game of the moment is Monopoly Cheaters Edition, in which I literally cannot cheat blatantly enough for the kids to catch me. That's mostly because they're not sufficiently vigilant (SteelyKid was playing with slime all during tonight's game), but they also never cheat themselves. I feel like collectively those things probably say something.

---

Quick on various family games:

• Sorry. Surprisingly enjoyable yet kid-friendly from really quite a young age? We've been playing it since at least the Pip was in kindergarten and probably earlier. Also, if you deliberately attempt to let kids win or lose less badly--I realize there are things to be said on various sides of this question--it's fairly easy to do so here by tweaking your strategy or flat-out stacking the deck.

• Hanabi. Cooperative card game, we play without the timer element just because it seemed complicated and I was looking for something very low stress. I don't find it very interesting but the kids enjoy it, so I'm willing.

• Exploding Kittens. Fun, quick & easy silliness.

• Qwirkle. Place tiles to match colors or shapes. The rules say have 6 tiles in your hand at a time, we play with a dozen to speed things up. The Pip has thoroughly and legitimately kicked my ass at this on multiple occasions.

• Incredibles Save the Day. Cooperative board game; very little strategy but, again, cooperative and low-stress and the kids enjoy it.

• Sushi Go Party. Card game where you assemble sets to score points, while passing the cards around the table. This is really fun, and the difficulty can be adjusted by judicious selection of the menu (and stacking the deck).

• Monopoly Cheaters Edition. The thing that interests me most about this is the rule tweaks to make it faster (though that's relative, tonight's game was still 90 minutes). An unsold property goes to auction if the person who landed on it doesn't want to buy it immediately; once all properties are sold, the game stops once everyone's gotten back to Go; and one property on each side of the board has a starting boost (free hotel or reduced purchase price). All of those could be imported into regular Monopoly just fine.

  The Cheaters part: there are cards in the center of the board with allowed cheats, like taking an unsold property card or moving someone else's piece. There are specified penalties and rewards for cheating with and without getting caught. I adjust the difficulty by quietly not playing Chance & Community Chest cards that would be too mean and--unsuccessfully, as mentioned above--trying to get caught cheating.

• Bonus: Blokus Trigon. Place differently-shaped colored tiles on a board so that the same colors touch only at points, not along their sides; try to get as many on as you can. Can be played cooperatively or competitively; we haven't played this enough to really get a feel for it, but I can see the potential. Also I'm very bad at spatial things so I think that will level the playing field.

If you have any recs for board games of similar difficulty, please comment!

---

I was going to write something about the kids taking up skiing, but Chad beat me to it. (I am too uncoordinated to take up an activity that involves strapping sticks to my feet and, more importantly, too old to do something that involves falling down a lot. The Pip can fall down every five minutes and bounce right back up without complaint, I really really cannot. Even though downhill looks like a lot more fun than cross-country.)

---

This comic is super-cute and then I laughed so loud at the added caption that I startled the dog.

---

I don't even go here but it's really nice to see Anthony Rapp as part of this Rent/Star Trek parody? (My ear's not very good but I think maybe some of those high notes at the end were a little challenging? Still. It's adorable and will only feed my current generalized Rent earworm, post-"live" broadcast. (Which I recorded but did not watch when it transpired that it was 90% a dress rehearsal.))

---

Finally, some years ago I gave up football on the grounds of fuck the NFL, and I have to admit that it's kind of nice to have thereby neatly avoided the question of whether I still wanted to root for the Pats.

Some things I've been meaning to link to (or did elsewhere), in roughly reverse chronological order.

The Daily Beast, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ Is an Insult to Freddie Mercury: "The film plays fast and loose with facts in a way that suggests the entire project was born out of resentment from the surviving members of Queen that, all these years after Mercury’s death, the band’s legacy is still so married to their late frontman’s outsize voice, personality, and celebrity. Bohemian Rhapsody smells like cinematic retribution, in which Mercury is posthumously punished. That he’s depicted in such broad strokes is even crueler, with his sexuality reduced to a partying vice and the so-called nitty-gritty of his life fully ignored..."

The AV Club, Whatever twist you’re expecting from this Spies In Disguise trailer, you’re wrong: this headline is 100% accurate.

Ryan North, I am a computer scientist and I am here to tell you to never trust a computer. Especially with voting. There's a step in here that I didn't quite understand, and has elsewhere been explained to me in slightly different terms, one that sounds like magic (and is more what I thought North was saying) and one that doesn't, but the upshot is that it's well-understood by computer scientists that if you can't examine a program down to its binary code--and you can't--then you can't trust it.

The Guardian, Can’t sleep? Perhaps you’re overtired. I have no, I say again no, idea what this is talking about... (Though when I force myself to open up the Calm app and put on one of the "sleep stories", this is why they work, I bet.)

NY Times, Let Our Algorithm Choose Your Halloween Costume. This is a really clear explanation of machine-learning algorithms and also fun silliness. (Definitely follow aiweirdness on tumblr!)

The Players' Tribune, What the Hell Happened to Darius Miles? I read this without knowing who he was, so I wasn't prepared for the turn, but it's great first-person storytelling. (He's ok. Content notes: depression, threatened violence to children, deaths of family members.)

The Atlantic, Seven Square Miles. "[T]he following images are snapshots from Google Earth, all rectangles of the same size and scale, approximately three and a half miles (5.6 kilometers) wide by two miles (3.2 kilometers) tall—showing seven square miles (18.1 square kilometers, or 4,480 acres) of the surface of our planet in each view."

Atlas Obscura, Spiedies. Yes, but we eat them on Italian bread, laid short-wise across and folded up around like a hot dog roll.

Fast Company, The untold story of the vegetable peeler that changed the world. "Over the years, abridged versions of the [OXO Good Grips] peeler’s origin story have been shared in design museums and even business schools. But talking to Smart’s founder, Davin Stowell, I had no clue how rich the history was, including cameos from Monsanto, samurai sword makers, and retail magicians from another era. What follows is his lightly edited story–an insider’s account of the world’s most famous vegetable peeler."

Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, Book Review: The Real Lolita by Sarah Weinman. Content note: "this review contains discussion about the kidnapping and sexual assault of an eleven-year-old girl, as well as a broader examination of how our culture treats rape victims." 

Blair Braverman, #bravermountainadventcalendar. A bunch of favorite Twitter threads about sled dogs. @BlairBraverman is one of the best Twitter follows I've made.

There's more, there's always more, but I (also always) have other things I ought to be doing now.

A Twitter thread of "good Charlottesville-based nonprofits those Nazi jerks would really hate"; donate and/or share to the extent you can.

Correctives to an article that, I admit, I shared at first: smartphones aren't destroying a generation from Slate and Psychology Today.

Oops, this mobile puzzle game Humble Bundle only has a day left: I've played and liked klocki, Hook, and Deus Ex GO, and I'm in the process of playing Zenge.

The Secret Life of the City Banana at the NYT; I love logistics-heavy looks at ordinary things like this.

Tag yourself, I'm X (that's a legible text version of this tweet).

A minute's worth of zoo animals escaping the heat; I think the last bit is my favorite.