Hi! Here's my about. Check out my authorblogging at junipercalle.com. I'm interested in zines/creative work and Doing Things, so if you are looking for people, please drop me a note?
Ismene and the Voice is on Royal Road and in eBook soon.
The Green Lodge Cypher is here. Currently complete at seventeen issues. It's an alternate universe rural Maryland fanzine with spooks and ciphertexts.
What are those images on my site? Fractals! Made with math! Not AI! You can make them too: google "fractal flame tutorial".
FYI if your employer does this, if they have done it for a long time especially, you and your coworkers could be owed huge amounts of unpaid wages and it would be an easy suit if there is a paper trail like this and your employer is placing strict requirements on your behavior while not at work. Employment lawyers generally work on contingency. Just food for thought.
A national park I worked at had all the permanent rangers (I was seasonal) basically on stand by for call outs 24-7 or they were penalized on their reviews.
They got tired of it, sued, won, and the nps had to pay back YEARS of back wages for stand by time. Now they are all scheduled and if* you get called out its time and a half.
People say about Gen AI ''well its going to be basically in every game in the next few years so get used to it" like, no... do you have any idea how stubborn I am? I will never play another new game in MY LIFE if that is the case. There are plenty of old ones I missed. "Oh what about books and TV?" SAME. I do not care. I will stop consuming new media forever if GenAI is going to be in everything.
Yes, This is absolutely the hill I will die on (AND WE WILL ALL DIE ON IF COMPANIES DONT STOP PUSHING AI AND BUILDING FUCKING DATA CENTERS EVERYHERE FUCK)
Do not forget that discord is still planning on moving forward with age verification and has only "delayed it" until "the later half of 2026." They are hoping you will forget while they quietly roll it out when no one is looking. Continue to message them about it. Continue to talk about it. Make it clear this is unacceptable. Discord is one of the only places left you can even talk about or share adult content in private at scale anymore. They will tell you "its not that bad if you dont use it for nsfw" but fuck them and fuck people who say that shit.
Man, the first year or two of smartphones was wild. watching the whole consumer software environment go from "it's good if you know how a program works on your computer" to "it's not software! it's an app! it's safe and easy and it CAN'T do bad things! What's consumer data selling? Don't worry about it!"? And have that work? was a trip.
Like, I knew my peers knew what software was, and still people started calling phone software "not software, it's an app". And look at the scope of the unregulated, monetized data harvesting that's commonplace now. "App" is a marketing term, part of an effort to mislead people about what software they were running and what that software could do with their data. And it worked. That's some people's default word for computer software now.
Sure, laws are written in blood, and it's not like laws get in ahead of major technological changes, so that's how we got stuck with this being legal, but it sucks to be in the thick of it.
Alt Text: Four panels of a comic by artist Joshua W. Cotter entitled "Make Art".
Panel 1: "Art poses a threat to corporatocratic systems because a purpose of art is to remind the individual of their inherent autonomy. Their humanity."
Panel 2: "That is a purpose in direct diametric opposition to that of corporatocratic systems: objectification of the individual for profit and control."
Panel 3: "Generative A.I. is part of an authoritarian corporatocratic effort to co-opt and commodify the creative process to rid the end result — art — of that with threatens its existence — humanity."
Panel 4: "Resist commodification. Defy corporatocracy. Defy oligarchy. Defy their anti-human, anti-life authoritarian movement. Make art." — JWC, 02-10-26
So, the long-dreaded death of my shipping solution's API integration hit me. Pirateship is very useful as an aggregator for multiple points of sale, and Etsy's shipping isn't something I want to rely on since Etsy's already honest about scraping every penny they can. Sure, I can cave and go to the services Etsy (for some ulterior motive) wants me to have access to, but Pirateship WORKS and I like it.
You can use Pirateship via copying and pasting the information, and copying the confirmation information back to Etsy, but that is grindingly inefficient.
So I did what a customer is allowed to do, and called the help line. Well, I requested a call, since you cannot call Etsy directly (that would be useful), or chat (that would require the chat to load on Firefox, and also not to be an LLM).
After four tries (two hangups and one callback that doesn't get picked up, because answering calls would be useful), I have a case number for a feature request (namely, restoring Pirateship's access) and an e-mail to follow up on. I will be following up on this.
If you use Pirateship and are running into this, I highly recommend you make that feature request as well. It's the only way things ever un-shittify.
One of the Discord people posted a statement that boiled down to, "Don't worry! Most people will never be asked for their ID! We've harvested enough data about most of you to know how old you are."
Which is not as reassuring as they seem to think it is.
And which only restated that they're doing the thing they said they'd do in the first place. Their original announcement just buried that part a little more.
Sally Childs-Helton on filk: "Filkers deeply value making music together in small groups more than they value winning large audiences and selling product."
I'd love to see more filk at conventions (especially anime/genpop conventions, there are so many these days!) I can see a few reasons why the culture never turned over, aside from the generational reasons. Filk is more folk than pop or rock music, so the online fan music culture doesn't always see it or take notice. Filk is something people do in groups, at conventions, or without much fanfare online; some do venue performances, but the social and noncommercial nature means that some musicians considers them selves 'real' vs. filk being somehow not. (ed.: some of this is due to filk's hodgepodge nature; not all tunes are original; not all songs are. What you bring to the circle is filk. Yet there are so many fan songs in filk, and the connection of fandom culture to spacefaring aspirations and social commentary are vast in filk.)
Pop Junctions has evolved from Henry Jenkins' 'Confessions of an Aca-Fan' into a platform of diverse content generated by a collective edito
We are protecting our neighbors in North Minneapolis by monitoring IC… Chris Baker needs your support for Support Safety Gear for North Minn
Want to help Minneapolis? With the rise of both our neighbors and our observers being abducted by ICE, this necessary safety equipment can help keep everyone safer. Donate if you can, share if you are so moved.
Despite what you might be hearing in the media, ICE is still very present on our streets and are escalating their violence against all who come across them.
They are not safe. US citizens are not safe in their own country, and it is not because of an outside threat, nor that they are secretly foolish or malicious, as some may insist. As an American, it's my duty to do what I can to help them. Life, liberty, and happiness are worth supporting.
I hope that one day my family, and I, might feel like it's possible again.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Having been through the US immigration process (I got my first work visa more than 25 years ago and became a citizen in 2022), it's obvious to me that Americans have no idea how weird and tortuous their immigration system is:
As of a couple years ago, Americans' ignorance of their own immigration system was merely frustrating, as I encountered both squishy liberals and xenophobic conservatives talking about undocumented immigrants and insisting that they should "just follow the rules." But today, as murderous ICE squads patrol our streets kidnapping people and sending them to concentration camps where they are beaten to death or deported to offshore slave labor prisons, the issue has gone from frustrating to terrifying and enraging.
Let's be clear: I played the US immigration game on the easiest level. I am relatively affluent – rich enough to afford fancy immigration lawyers with offices on four continents – and I am a native English speaker. This made the immigration system ten thousand times (at a minimum) easier for me than it is for most US immigrants.
There are lots of Americans (who don't know anything about their own immigration system) who advocate for a "points-based" system that favors rich people and professionals, but America already has this system, because dealing with the immigration process costs tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, and without a lawyer, it is essentially unnavigable. Same goes for Trump's "Golden Visa" for rich people – anyone who can afford to pay for one of these is already spending five- or six-figure sums with a white shoe immigration firm.
I'm not quite like those people, though. The typical path to US work visas and eventual immigration is through a corporate employer, who pays the law firm on your behalf (and also ties your residency to your employment, making it risky and expensive to quit your job). I found my own immigration lawyers through a friend's husband who worked in a fancy investment bank, and it quickly became apparent that immigration firms assume that their clients have extensive administrative support who can drop everything to produce mountains of obscure documents on demand.
There were lots of times over the years when I had to remind my lawyers that I was paying them, not my employer, and that I didn't have an administrative assistant, so when they gave me 48 hours' notice to assemble 300 pages of documentation (this happened several times!), it meant that I had to drop everything (that is, the activities that let me pay their gigantic invoices) to fulfill their requests.
When you deal with US immigration authorities, everything is elevated to the highest possible stakes. Every step of every process – work visa, green card, citizenship – comes with forms that you sign, on penalty of perjury, attesting that you have made no mistakes or omissions. A single error constitutes a potential falsification of your paperwork, and can result in deportation – losing your job, your house, your kid's schooling, everything.
This means that, at every stage, you have to be as comprehensive as possible. This is a photo of my second O-1 ("Alien of Extraordinary Ability") visa application. It's 800 pages long:
Like I say, I became a citizen in 2022 (for some reason, my wife got her citizenship in 2021, even though we applied jointly). At that point, I thought I was done with the process. But then my kid applied to university and was told that she should sign up for FERPA, which is the federal student loan and grant process; she got pretty good grades and there was a chance she could get a couple grand knocked off her tuition. Seemed like a good idea to me.
So we filled in the FERPA paperwork, and partway through, it asks if you are a naturalized citizen, and, if you are, it asks you to upload a copy of your certificate of citizenship. My wife and I both have certificates, but the kid doesn't – she was naturalized along with my wife in 2021, and while my wife's certificate was sufficient to get our daughter a passport, it doesn't actually have the kid's name on it.
I checked in with our lawyers and was told that the kid couldn't get her certificate of citizenship until she turned 18, which she did last Tuesday. My calendar reminded me that it was time to fill in her N-600, the form for applying for a certificate of citizenship.
So yesterday, I sat down at the computer, cleared a couple hours, and went to work. I am used to gnarly bureaucratic questions on this kind of paperwork, and I confess I get a small thrill of victory whenever I can bring up an obscure document demanded by the form. For example: I was able to pull up the number of the passport our daughter used to enter the country in 2015, along with the flight number and date. I was able to pull up all three of the numbers that the US immigration service assigned to both my wife and me.
And then, about two hours into this process, I got to this section of the form: "U.S. citizen mother or father's physical presence." This section requires me to list every border crossing I made into the USA from the day I was born until the date I became a citizen. That includes, for example, the time when I was two years old and my parents took me to Fort Lauderdale to visit my retired grandparents. This question comes after a screen where you attest that you will not make any omissions or errors, and that any such omission or error will be treated as an attempt to defraud the US immigration system, with the most severe penalties imaginable.
I tried to call the US immigration service's info line. It is now staffed exclusively by an AI chatbot (thanks, Elon). I tried a dozen times to get the chatbot to put me on the phone with a human who could confirm what I should do about visits to the US that I took more than 50 years ago, when I was two years old. But the chatbot would only offer to text me a link to the online form, which has no guidance on this subject.
Then I tried the online chat, which is also answered by a chatbot. This chatbot only allows you to ask questions that are less than 80 characters long. Eventually, I managed to piece together a complete conversation with the chatbot that conveyed my question, and it gave me a link to the same online form.
But there is an option to escalate the online chat from a bot to a human. So I tried that, and, after repeatedly being prompted to provide my full name and address (home address and mailing address), date of birth, phone number – and disconnected for not typing all this quickly enough – the human eventually pasted in boilerplate telling me to consult an immigration attorney and terminated the chat before I could reply.
Just to be clear here: this is immigration on the easiest setting. I am an affluent native English speaker with access to immigration counsel at a fancy firm.
Imagine instead that you are not as lucky as I am. Imagine that your parents brought you to the USA 60 years ago, and that you've been a citizen for more than half a century, but you're being told that you should carry your certificate of citizenship if you don't want to be shot in the face or kidnapped to a slave labor camp. Your parents – long dead – never got you that certificate, so you create an online ID with the immigration service and try to complete form N-600. Do you know the date and flight number for the plane you flew to America on when you were three? Do you know your passport number from back then? Do you have all three of each of your dead parents' numeric immigration identifiers? Can you recover the dates of every border crossing your parents made into the USA from the day they were born until the day they became citizens?
Anyone who says that "immigrants should just follow the rules" has missed the fact that the rules are impossible to follow. I get to do luxury Kafka, the business class version of US immigration Kafka, where you get to board first and nibble from a dish of warm nuts while everyone else shuffles past you, and I've given up on getting my daughter's certificate of citizenship. The alternative – omitting a single American vacation between 1971 and 2022 – could constitute an attempt to defraud the US immigration system, after all.
This was terrible a couple years ago, when the immigration system still had human operators you could reach by sitting on hold for several hours. Today, thanks to a single billionaire's gleeful cruelty, the system is literally unnavigable, "staffed" by a chatbot that can't answer basic questions. A timely reminder that the only jobs AI can do are the jobs that no one gives a shit about:
It's also a timely reminder of the awesome destructive power of a single billionaire. This week, I took a Southwest flight to visit my daughter at college for her 18th birthday, and of course, SWA now charges for bags and seats. Multiple passengers complained bitterly and loudly about this as they boarded (despite the fact that the plane was only half full, many people were given middle seats and banned from moving to empty rows). One woman plaintively called out, "Why does everything get worse all the time?" (Yes, I'm aware of the irony of someone saying that within my earshot):
Southwest sucks today because of just one guy: Paul Singer, the billionaire owner of Elliott Investment Management, who bought a stake in SWA and used it to force the board to end open seating and free bag-check, then sold off his stake and disappeared into the sunset, millions richer, leaving behind a pile of shit where a beloved airline once flew:
One guy, Elon Musk, took the immigration system from "frustrating and inefficient" to "totally impossible." That same guy is an avowed white nationalist – and illegal US immigrant who did cheat the immigration system – who sadistically celebrates the unlimited cruelty the immigration system heaps on other immigrants:
Again: I've got it easy. The people they want to put in concentration camps are doing something a million times harder than anything I've had to do to become a US citizen. People sometimes joke about how Americans couldn't pass the US citizenship test, with its questions about the tortured syntax of the 10th Amendment and the different branches of government. But the US citizenship test is the easy part. That test sits at the center of a bureaucratic maze that no American could find their way through.
And then, about two hours into this process, I got to this section of the form: "U.S. citizen mother or father's physical presence." This section requires me to list every border crossing I made into the USA from the day I was born until the date I became a citizen.
I knew it was bad. I did not know it was this bad.
– 92% of respondents reported feeling somewhat to very “calm / peaceful” after visiting the Library
– 74% of respondents reported that their library use positively affects how equipped they feel to cope with the world
– 90% of respondents reported that their Library use positively affects how much they love to learn new things
– 88% of respondents reported that their Library use has supported their personal growth
Ok the US Attorney General says that she will remove ICE if MN drops all our sanctuary laws, complies with ICE, hands over all our SNAP, Medicaid and voter rolls. They demand control over our voter registration so they can "ensure free and fair elections".
They want to control our elections.
I am dead serious people call your representatives. Get volunteering. Get protesting. Get LOUD.
They released a letter full of straight up lies. Spread the truth. MAKE NOISE.
