Imagine if a like 8 foot tall guy that looked kinda like an alien species just kinda showed up at the house you rent a room in and crashed on the couch and at first everyone hated him but you kinda just accepted this weird massive kinda-human alien species thing as a part of your group even though he's like twice the size of everyone else there
So there's two species of sea lion in North America: the California sea lion, ranging along California (including Baja) but not ranging into the north coast or into oregon
And the Stellar's sea lion, which are WAY bigger and live in Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska
A male Stellars sea lion showed up in SF like a month ago and just kinda. Didn't know what to do, and joined a colony of California sea lions, and is just kinda chilling there now.
Weird vagrant species happen from time to time, but this is just a particularly funny instance of a highly social species getting very lost, and just trying to blend in with its closest nearby relatives
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:
A core tenet of the enshittification hypothesis is that all the terrible stuff we're subjected to in our digital lives today is the result of foreseeable (and foreseen) policy choices, which created the enshittogenic policy environment in which the worst people's worst ideas make the most money:
Take commercial surveillance. Google didn't have to switch from content-based ads (which chose ads based on your search terms and the contents of webpages) to surveillance-based ads (which used dossiers on your searches, emails, purchases and physical movements to target ads to you, personally). The content-based ads made Google billions, but the company made a gamble that surveillance-based ads would make them more money.
That gamble had two parts: the first was that advertisers would pay more for surveillance ads. This is the part we all focus on – the collusion between people who want to sell us stuff and companies willing to spy on us to help them do it.
But the other half of the bet is far more important: namely, whether spying on us would cost Google anything. Would they face fines? Would users collect massive civil judgments over these privacy violations? Would Google face criminal charges? These are the critical questions, because even if advertisers are willing to pay a premium for surveillance ads, it only makes sense to collect that premium if the excess profit it represents is larger than the anticipated penalties for committing surveillance crimes.
What's more, advertisers and Google execs all work for their shareholders, in a psychotic "market system" in which the myth of "fiduciary duty" is said to require companies to hurt us right up to the point where the harms they inflict on the world cost them more than the additional profits those harms deliver:
But the policymakers who ultimately determine whether the fines, judgments and criminal penalties outstrip the profits from spying – they work for us. They draw their paychecks from the public purse in exchange for safeguarding our interests, and they have manifestly failed at this.
Why did Google decide to start spying on us? For the same reason your dog licks its balls: because they could. The last consumer privacy law to make it out of the US Congress was a 1988 bill that banned video-store clerks from disclosing your VHS rentals:
And yes, the EU did pass a comprehensive consumer privacy law, but then abdicated any duty to enforce the GDPR, because US Big Tech companies pretend to be Irish, and Ireland is a crime-haven that lets the tax-evaders who maintain the fiction of a Dublin HQ break any EU law they find inconvenient:
The most important question for Google wasn't "Will advertisers pay more for surveillance targeting?" It was "Will lawmakers clobber us for spying on the whole internet?" And the answer to that second question was a resounding no.
Why did policymakers fail us? It's not much of a mystery, I'm afraid. Policymakers failed us because cops and spies hate privacy laws and lobby like hell against them. Cops and spies love commercial surveillance, because the private sector's massive surveillance dossiers are an off-the-books trove of warrantless surveillance data that the government can't legally collect. What's more, even if the spying was legal, buying private sector surveillance data is much cheaper than creating a public sector surveillance apparatus to collect the same info:
The harms of mass commercial surveillance were never hard to foresee. 20 years ago, Radar magazine commissioned a story from me about "the day Google turned evil," and I turned in "Scroogled," which was widely shared and reprinted:
Radar is long gone, though it's back in the news now, thanks to the revelation that it was financed via Jeffrey Epstein as part of his plan to both control and loot magazines and newspapers:
But the premise of "Scroogled" lives on. 20 years ago, I wrote a story in which the bloated, paranoid, lawless DHS raided ad-tech databases of behavioral data in order to target people for secret arrests, extraordinary rendition, and torture.
It took a minute, but today, the DHS is paying data-brokers and ad-tech giants like Google for commercial surveillance data that it is using to feed the systems that automatically decide who will be kidnapped, rendered and tortured by ICE:
I want to be clear here: I'm not claiming any prescience – quite the reverse in fact. My point is that it just wasn't very hard to see what would happen if we let the surveillance advertising industry run wild. Our lawmakers were warned. They did nothing. They exposed us to this risk, which was both foreseeable and foreseen.
Nor did the ICE/ad-tech alliance drop out of the sky. The fascist mobilization of ad-tech data for a racist pogrom is the latest installment in a series of extremely visible, worsening weaponizations of commercial surveillance. Just last year, I testified before Biden's CFPB at hearings on a rule to kill the data-broker industry, where we heard from the Pentagon about ad-tech targeting of American military personnel with gambling problems with location-based ads that reached them in their barracks:
Biden's CFPB passed the data broker-killing rule, but Trump and DOGE nuked it before it went into effect. Trump officials didn't offer any rationale for this, despite the fact that the testimony in that hearing included a rep from the AARP who described how data brokers let advertisers target seniors with signs of dementia (a core Trump voter bloc). I don't know for sure, but I have a sneaking suspicion that the Stephen Miller wing of the Trump coalition wanted data brokers intact so that they could use them to round up and imprison/torture/murder/enslave non-white people and Trump's political enemies.
Despite this eminently foreseeable outcome of the ad-tech industry, many perfectly nice people who made extremely nice salaries working in ad-tech are rather alarmed by this turn of events:
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/11/30/salary/
On Adxchanger.com, ad-tech exec David Nyurenberg writes, "The Privacy ‘Zealots’ Were Right: Ad Tech’s Infrastructure Was Always A Risk":
Nyurenberg opens with a very important point – not only is ad-tech dangerous, it's also just not very good at selling stuff. The claims for the efficacy of surveillance advertising are grossly overblown, and used to bilk advertisers out of high premiums for a defective product:
There's another point that Nyurenberg doesn't make, but which is every bit as important: many of ad-tech's fiercest critics have abetted ad-tech's rise by engaging in "criti-hype" (repeating hype claims as criticism):
The "surveillance capitalism" critics who repeated tech's self-serving mumbo-jumbo about "hacking our dopamine loops" helped ad-tech cast itself in the role of mind-controlling evil sorcerers, which greatly benefited these self-styled Cyber-Rasputins when they pitched their ads to credulous advertisers:
Nyurenberg points to European privacy activists like Johnny Ryan and Max Schrems, who have chased American surveillance advertising companies out of the Irish courts and into other EU territories and even Europe's federal court, pointing out that these two (and many others!) have long warned the world about the way that this data would be weaponized. Johnny Ryan famously called ad-tech's "realtime bidding" system, "the largest data breach ever recorded":
Ryan is referring to the fact that you don't even have to buy an ad to amass vast databases of surveillance data about internet users. When you land on a webpage, every one of the little boxes where an ad will eventually show up gets its own high-speed auction in which your private data is dangled before anyone with an ad-tech account, who gets to bid on the right to shove an ad into your eyeballs. The losers of that auction are supposed to delete all your private data that they get to see through this process, but obviously they do not.
And Max Schrems has hollered from the mountaintops for years about the inevitability of authoritarian governments helping themselves to ad-tech data in order to suppress dissent and terrorize their political opposition:
Nyurenberg says his friends in ad-tech are really upset that these (eminently foreseeable) outcomes have come to pass, but (he says), ad-tech bosses claim they have no choice but to collaborate with the Trump regime. After all, we've seen what Trump does to companies that don't agree to help him commit crimes:
Nyurenberg closes by upbraiding his ad-tech peers for refusing to engage with their critics during the decades in which it would have been possible to do something to prevent this outcome. Ad-tech insiders dismissed privacy activists as unrealistic extremists who wanted to end advertising itself and accused ad-tech execs of wanting to create a repressive state system of surveillance. In reality, critics were just pointing out the entirely foreseeable repressive state surveillance that ad-tech would end up enabling.
I'm quite pleased to see Nyurenberg calling for a reckoning among his colleagues, but I think there's plenty of blame to spread around. Sure, the ad-tech industry built this fascist dragnet – but a series of governments around the world let them do it. There was nothing inevitable about mass commercial surveillance. It doesn't even work very well! Mass commercial surveillance is the public-private partnership from hell, where cops and spies shielded ad-tech companies from regulation in exchange for those ad-tech companies selling cops and spies unlimited access to their databases.
Our policymakers are supposed to work for us. They failed us. Don't let anyone tell you that the greed and depravity of ad-tech are the sole causes of Trump's use of ad-tech to decide who to kidnap and send to a Salvadoran slave-labor camp. Policymakers should have known. They did know. They had every chance to stop this. They did not.
Image:
Jakub Hałun (modified):
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Times_Square,_New_York_City,_20231006_1916_2338.jpg
CC BY 4.0:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/deed.en
I think it was Macy himself, last century, who said something like "Half the money I spend on advertising works, and half of it doesn't. Problem is I have no idea which half is which." Since online ads began, the ratio is more like 95% wasted, 5% useful, and it's even harder to tell what's the useful 5%.
#former adman
#the profit incentive for surveillance advertising was never a measurable increase in product sales
"the best way to screw jkr over is by making her characters queer!" actually. The best way to screw jkr over is to stop engaging with the property she still profits off of and read a different fucking book
also, if you decide you REALLY wanna watch the new show/ movies THAT BAD, pirate that shit!!!! piracy is your best friend along with a good vpn!!!! if you wanna buy her books, thrift it! go on ebay or pangobooks or your local library or a thrift store or depop! don't give that wench your money!!!!
I'm gonna hold your hands while I say this: it's not enough.
HP Fandom isn't just a problem because of the direct financial support. It also continues to infuse the IP, and JKR as a result, with cultural capital and social influence. It gives jkr a cultural relevance that means her words are platformed more seriously and more widely than other authors whose works are not infused with this level of sustained popularity. She has said, very plainly, that she (and the people who will fund her future projects) views ALL Fandom action as support.
And also, quite frankly, the last book was published in 2007. Please read a new book.
It should be obvious, but...studios and publishers are aware of piracy too.
When anyone, let alone JKR, negotiates a new deal, their piracy stats are front and center as part of their "this is how big I am and worth more money" pitch.
One of the reasons HBO invested so much money in the later seasons of GoT: the first season episodes set piracy records.
Even pirating JKR's stuff helps her make money. Stop it.
Body horror is when there's a body with some horror. Elevated horror is when there's an elevator and some horror. Folk horror is when there's folks and, anyway you get the idea.
I was clowning about non-horror people trying come up with horror definitions that exclude anything problematic, but the number of people who think Devil is the only horror movie about elevators when it's very nearly a sub-genre.
Oh, okay. I see. You think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don’t know, that gaslight gatekeep girlboss meme, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you think modern feminism has been co-opted by corporations. But what you don’t know is that that meme is not from Instagram, it's not from Twitter, it's not from Tiktok, it’s actually from Tumblr. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in January 2021, Tumblr user missnumber1111 posted, "today's agenda: gaslight gatekeep and most importantly girlboss." And then I think it was a-m-e-t-h-y-s-t-r-o-s-e, wasn’t it, who reblogged it with an image of the phrase edited over a piece of "Live, Laugh, Love" wall art? And then gaslight gatekeep girlboss showed up in the feeds of eight different Twitter repost accounts. Then it filtered down through Instagram and then trickled on down into some tragic “alt side of Tiktok” where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that meme represents millions of notes and countless Tumblr users and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from Tumblr when, in fact, you’re wearing the meme that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of “stuff.”
Long before the introduction of color film, a Russian chemist and photographer named Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky used an innovative technique. He took three individual black and white photos, each through a colored filter (red, green, and blue), to create fully colored, high-quality pictures. The photo of this woman, taken by him, is around 107 years old!
Interesting follow-up on his method: over a century later, modern film historians and preservationists would decide that the absolute best method for image preservation -- methodology, not medium -- was to preserve it in four passes: grayscale, red, green, and blue. With those four layers, any process, old or in the future, can accurately reproduce the intended image.
Which happens to be almost exactly how he took these pictures, and why they are still so vibrant and "real" feeling.
The biggest misconception in public schools is that literary analysis is about proving you can be right or wrong about a book you read
Literary analysis isn’t about the book
It’s not even about being right
It’s about performing an investigation and presenting your case to the jury
It doesn’t matter if your defendant killed that guy or not. If you can convince the jury he didn’t, you’ve won
And the incredible life skill of spinning bulletproof bullshit out your ass with a handful of facts and a prayer is soooooooo much more valuable than anyone’s ever gonna tell you
If the average tweenager knew that good media analysis meant you could force your English teacher to admit that fuckin- (rolls dice) What’s Eating Gilber Grape is a metaphor for (rolls dice again) Why the crack cocaine epidemic is good actually- we would have far better literacy and critical thinking skills as a nation. And I stand by that
You could develop the magical psychic and illusory power to force the middle aged bitchfuck who makes you raise your hand and beg for permission to take a shit accept the premise that Cocomelon is a subversive and scathing artistic commentary on the pitfalls of modern democracy. Chat GPT essay engines are stealing this from you
The most significant lesson I ever received in Literature classes was that everything is actually about abortion.
My regular teacher was out for the day, so the “this guy works here but nobody quite knows what he’s supposed to do” substitute was in for her. His name was Mr. Moony. I suspect, knowing more now, that Mr. Moony was the special education coordinator for gifted and talented students. But that’s all besides the point.
The only thing that mattered about Mr. Moony for this story is that every student knew you never learned anything when he was in, because he was always batshit insane. He would completely disregard plans, throw them away, and tell us to do something different.
When he came in, we had just finished reading Waiting for Godot. We were well on our way to an AP Lit exam, tired and worried, and we had a practice essay coming up based on this play. And he said, “you’re all burnt the hell out, so I’m going to write an essay for you.” We all cheered because, hell yes, a lecture day. We didn’t have to do shit. We could all tune out and stop caring.
And then he started going.
We were enraptured. This man deconstructed the two act play into a masterpiece, quoting ancient literature on theology and God, as well as personal details about the author, to reveal to us all that, actually, Waiting for Godot was the author’s roundabout way to show the anguish behind the politics of the pro-life/anti-choice movements, and the author’s criticisms of abortion.
He went on for a half hour, writing faster than we could really keep up with. By the end of his rant, we were all nodding along. At the end, he slammed his hand on the board and shouted “ABORTION” to really make his point.
“So, do you all think that’s what this story is about?”
The majority of us nodded, myself included. And this man looked at us, scrunched his face like Kermit the Fucking Frog, and went, “no the fuck it’s not. I made all that up.”
There was a beat of everyone feeling like their time was wasted. Some students very frustrated because they were trying to take notes and just realized it all was fabricated. One or two who were angry about being woken up to him shouting abortion.
And then he looked at us. “How many of you only believe it’s about abortion because that’s what I just told you to think?”
Quite a few raised their hands.
“Then I did English good.”
The rest of the time of class was spent with him teaching us various styles of analysis, though sadly my amnesia has claimed most of this part from me. I remember my belief in English being entirely shaken at this point. But at the same time, I also got what he was saying, and it opened my eyes to new things.
There is no right answer in literary analysis. There’s just answers people want to hear, or answers that are compelling, or answers that aren’t those things. The answer that Waiting for Godot was about abortion was not something all of us wanted to hear, but he made the answer sound compelling — and so we were riveted.
My next essay I wrote for that class was about the setting of the play, and how the entirety of Waiting for Godot centers on the anxieties of losing the modern family — and even modern life as we know it — to technology, and via that idea, the climate crisis.
I got a 100%. My teacher highlighted my (thankfully anonymous to the class) essay, particularly because the first sentence was “compelling,” due to my absence of proper grammar rules; I’d started it off by just saying, “trees.”
That was the day I really knew I loved English — not just enjoyed reading and writing, but genuine love of playing with the language. And it’s this love that I try to instill into my students.
It was my junior year in high school. A private school, ivy league prep, so even the non-honors English class was intense. One major work a week: quiz Monday to prove we'd read it, three days of discussion, then Friday was an in-class essay on one of the topics we'd discussed (wouldn't find out which until Friday's class).
Although T.S. Eliot and The Wasteland in particular are now, for me, amongst the Greatest Things to Ever Exist and form a bedrock of my creative world, at the time I was so busy with extracuricular stuff and other AP classes that I only skimmed the poem on Sunday, night, enough to guess my way to a C on the Monday quiz.
And then I either napped or did homework for my AP Calculus class for the three days of discussion on the Wasteland.
Come Friday, and our essay assignment is to extract a theme from each section and use them to support your position on the poem's central theme.
Great, just specific and vague enough that I had no idea what to do. Friday essay's were open book, they weren't testing memorization, they were testing comprehension, so I very, very quickly read the poem. That was the first 10 minutes of an hour-long class.
I then spent 5 minutes trying to find words or phrases that might be similar in the various sections, and then another 5 trying to figure out how I might connect them.
Not "how they connected" but "how I might connect them". See, I had no idea of any of the themes that had been discussed that week, either per section or for the piece overall. And though I had certainly managed to improvise my way through tought spots before, never had I been presented with such a pure You Have to Just Make Shit Up scenario.
So I had to fake it, and used my neurodivergent vocabularly to pull off some real hair-pin twists and turns -- if I remember correctly, I argued that each section represented a Thing in a Place, and that as you progress through the poem, each Thing and Place informs the next one in a way that seamlessly builds to the overaching theme like a fractal, and surely Eliot was inspired by Mandlebrot's work on fractals (thank you Tim Power's Last Call, which I had read mostly during a boring Honors US History class).
I scribbled out about 1500 words towards that end over the remaining 40 minutes, and handed in my handwritten pages (that's how we used to do it) at the end of class, very glad this this was not an honors class and that I had time to make up for it before year's end.
The following Monday, after our quiz on, I think, the Green Kinght, she handed back the essays, as she always did, and instead of a letter grade on mine, she'd just written "See me."
So, during lunch, I slumped my way up to her office, ready for my talking to (it wouldn't be the first "wasting so much potential" speech in my life, nor the last).
She sat me down, and asked me if I had thought of pursuing literary criticism as a field, and if I would be willing to work with her to polish my essay up to be published in an academic journal.
Let that sink in. I still am.
Set aside how it would feel for a precociously-bright, neurodivergent 15 year old to be told by their teacher/mentor that they are already working at an Academic level and ready to be Published like a real Scholar...
I sat there, and in 15 minutes, made up out of whole cloth a vaguely-tennuous connection between various words, quoted my most-recently-read book with the serial numbers stripped off, and was hoping to only get called out for not taking things seriously, as opposed to cheating (that's why I bullshitted instead of trying to buy a paper, I always chose a lecture over Them being dissapointed in me Morally).
And instead, a Smart person, a Teacher, was absolutely taken in by my bullshit. Just totally snowed over. Clearly I'm now smarter than my teachers...
But, did I? Did I really just Make Up some Bullshit? Or did I Actually Find Something in the text, something worth further discussion?
Over that lunch break she convinced me of the latter. She showed me other criticism publications and literary journals and broke down how my essay would work alongside them. It was in the interest of helping me polish it to be in submission format and a bit better worded than what I could come up with in 40 minutes.
And I still believe it today. Yeah, I absolutely made up a Story about The Wasteland, one not based on any normal classroom discussion or traditional critical reading of the text. But that's basically what scholarship is, isn't it, at least when we're here in the world of literary criticism?
Speaking as a writer of fiction, people have found things in my work that I was absolutely blind to. In fact, within the larger queer/neurodivergent community, and even to TV and movie, more and more writers are initially saying "thank you so much for saying how realistic my portrayal of someone autistic/trans/etc. is, I'm not, but I'm glad it felt real for you," and then, a few months or years later, following up with "you know, after much reflection and/or visits to therapy, I'm proud to announce that I'm trans/autistic/etc., and yes, all you readers who guessed that was a self-insert character, you were right, I just didn't realize it yet."
A teacher once told me a quote from a famous writer -- think Twain or Hemmingway, or even Bob Dylan -- probably apochryphal, which was a response to a critic/interviewer. The interviewer was asking the writer about some specific meaning or symbology in something they had written, and the writer responded something like,
"Sure, you know what, whatever you find in there, just give me credit for it."
I don't really have a point. These posts just made me remember that class and that essay, and how I fundamentally changed for me what it meant for someone to Understand something.
If you’re Christian and reading this and feeling touchy about the fact that we Jews are saying that you don’t meaningfully follow the same Bible that we do, here’s an excellent breakdown from a Christian perspective:
The key thing to notice when asking this question of white evangelicals in America is that they don't usually try to answer it. They don't r
Tl;dr: the Christian categories of “moral” and “ceremonial” law that are used to justify Christians invoking Leviticus while simultaneously following none of Leviticus are extra-textual, inconsistent, and clearly self-serving on their face.
“Rules about my money and my property become optional. Rules about your genitals and your sexuality do not.”
You do not follow ours laws. You do not consider yourselves to be bound by our sacred texts. We do not consider you to be bound by our sacred texts. Stop invoking them to further your agenda; they are irrelevant to your faith and to your behavior, both according to your own doctrine and according to ours.
What's fascinating (to me, an ex-believer) is that this very question -- do followers of Jesus the Christ need to follow Jewish law -- is at the center of the gospels and was THE primary question the early church was trying to deal with.
More Jewish-focused gospels like Mark and Matthew generally come down on the side of Yes, the whole point of Jesus being here is that people have stopped following the Law as written, and he's there to remind everyone that, since God's Return is happening within our lifetime, our only choice is to follow the Law as closely as possible so that we are in harmony with God when he shows up in a couple years.
(The main tension between those 2 gospels is that Mark seems to be putting forth the idea that Jesus's message is just for Jews, and that once God does return, the 12 tribes of Israel will rule over the earth, and that's why 12 disciples, since each will rule one of those kingdoms [which, incidentally, is one of the "most likely said by the historical Jesus" lines in all of the gospels, because it's implication is that "all 12 disciples will rule a kingdom of Israel" includes Judas, who was the Traitor, but this makes it seem like Jesus didn't know that yet, and no true believer after Jesus's death would have made up a line that in any way showed Jesus as not being aware that Judas would betray him, the way the line in the gospel actually does] . Gentiles are sort of assumed to be a lower-class citizen in this kingdom of god, like most religiously-focused power systems at the time (i.e. Jews under Roman rule). Matthew, meanwhile, is the first of the gospels to introduce the idea that gentiles can also be repent and be right with God, but only if they accept Jesus's message and follow the Jewish law to a T.)
But then, by the time of John, the message is sorta that the Jews already had a shot at being right with god, but they crucified his son, so really it's gentiles that Jesus came for in the first place, and his entire message is that the entirety of Jewish law is now moot. John is the only gospel that tells the story of the woman at the well and is where the "without sin throw the first stone" line comes from, which is about as a 180 from "an eye for an eye" as exists. In fact, when people go to the bible for their cherry-picked anti-semitism, they find most of their ammo in John, so pro-Gentile, anti-Jew the messaging is.
And holy shit do we not have time here to get into Paul's thoughts on the Jewish law and how they evolved over his lifetime and letters...
It's an incredibly deep and meaty historical debate. The kind that futures spin on. And somehow we ended up with the dumb “Rules about my money and my property become optional. Rules about your genitals and your sexuality do not.” timeline.
Okay so when I got sucked into the phantom zone last week while watching youtube shorts a lot of the content it fed me was ADHD tips and a lot of it was either useless for me or redundant but there was one REALLY good tip about taking breaks that wasn't about taking breaks it was about RETURNING from breaks and the tip is: when you are about to go on a break, before you step away from your task (work, craft project, school stuff) decide what you'll do as the first thing when you sit back down at your task and set up your workspace to do that thing.
That means you've got an easy re-entry point to go back to doing the thing instead of sitting back down and having to make a decision or having to reorient from break mode to task mode. You have pre-reoriented and can just go back into working mode.
I've been doing this by circling what my next task on my tasklist is and bringing up the windows that I'll need for the task before I step away from my desk.
Brilliant hack, works great for me, hope it works great for you as well.
Oh also some knitters do this thing where the second you finish making one sock you cast on the second sock and do at least a few stitches so that you don't get killed by inertia and have one sock finished and one sock never started forever.
A while back there was a Tumblr post about doing the same thing while writing fiction - when you finish one chapter don't call it quits for the day, write a sentence or two if the next chapter do that you aren't starting from a blank page, you're continuing what you were doing before.
The same thing applies to work and homework and housework. If you finish your english homework *don't* decide that's the perfect moment to take a break, get out your algebra textbook and do a problem or two first.
Initiating tasks is a kind of executive function, but sometimes executive function is in short supply and you can bank some effort by continuing one task from another instead of having harsh breaks between tasks.
The single greatest writing tip -- which, yeah, can be generalized to pretty much anything -- was, when you've made some progress for the day, enough to feel good about the progress, and you know what the next 3-4 sentences should be-ish...write a couple words of the first sentence and walk away.
Close the document or notebook, and don't allow yourself to return to it until the next day/session.
When you come back to it, you have a half-finished sentence where you know exactly the words to finish it, and another couple of sentences that you already have an idea about and have been wanting to finally get to for a while now...and off you go.
It is, fundamentally, the old adage to prime the pump, i.e., when you're done pumping your own water for the day, make sure there's a bit of a flow so the next time the pump is used, it can just start pumping water again, and doesn't have to start up from dry/scratch.
It was a courtesy you did to your family/neighbors/yourself, to make their lives a little easier. Prime your pumps.
Look, I know people want to react to the 'leopards eating faces party' with a big fat 'told you so,' but these are ex-cultists who are reaching out to people who may need an exit with a soft landing.
People who are deeply in a cult are afraid to leave it and MAGA is no exception! There's a fear that once you leave, you won't be accepted by anyone, so they stay even if they no longer believe in their rhetoric.
A very intelligent person can fall for a cult if they feel that it can offer them something they're missing. The outside world is perilous and you can be safe here. Your friends will reject you now that you've joined us, but we will accept you. Decisions are hard, we can make them for you. The secular world has broken you, we can give you new life through christ.
If you read some of the testimonies (and so many of them are young people) you'll see how much of it is 'I didn't see it, it took someone I love to show it to me, I can't unsee it now.' We've all done things we regret. Some regrets are bigger than others. I would rather forgive them and allow them to do good work than berate them for a decision they made when compromised by anxiety.
And it's 100% the sentiment that needs to be cultivated. If you want MAGA to go away or be diminished, then you have to give people grace when they leave. Not only that, but you literally have to make it as easy as possible, or all you're doing is cutting off your nose to spite your face.
If we don't make it possible to admit that you've made a mistake, no one will be able to leave.
This idea that once you've made a mistake and gotten taken in by a cult's propaganda, you're forever tainted? That's some serious Evangelical Christian bullshit of the same variety as the dirty chewing gum view of virginity. Yes, people should have to work to undo any harm they've done,* but it's important to remember that the victims of cults are exactly that:
Victims.
For a site that repeats "you are not immune to propaganda," people seem to act like a lack of immunity to propaganda is a fucking moral failing.
Historic wildfires blaze through LA months after the Democratically-run city cut fire service funds.
News headlines rhetorically ask us to consider what happens when CA inmates - working as firefighters for roughly $6 per hour - cannot contain unprecedented fires.
Billionaires drain the already water-starved state of its supply as hydrants dry up when needed most.
Important to note that those same incarcerated folk forced to save these multimillion dollar homes won’t find work in firefighting after they are released. Their record immediately disqualifies them from working for CalFire or any city fire department even though they worked alongside those same institutions during dangerous fire seasons.
Okay, 100% with you on the inmates being forced to fight fires then being disqualified when they're out, that's a big thing, a fucked up thing, and something that needs to change without delay, no nuance.
But some context for the others:
Regarding the fires as hitting areas with "multimillion-dollar" homes:
Yes, a lot of "multimillion-dollar" homes burned down in Pacific Palisades. So did a lot of homes worth less than a million dollars. So did literally hundreds of trailer homes all up and down the Santa Monica-to-Malibu coast. Those are all gone now too. Those people are homeless too.
Those inmates fought those fires to protect those people too.
And all the businesses that burned down in the "multimllion dollar" Palisades: the people who worked there didn't live there. They live in Van Nuys, and Mid City, and anywhere else they can scrape a room together in this rediculously expensive city. They now no longer have jobs. No incomes. No way to make rent next month.
Not to mention: the Palisades are the very definition of a Boomer Wealth enclave, meaning: you generally don't get rich then move there. They bought those houses in the 50's, and 60's, and 70's, when they cost very little, even by the standards of their time, and have spent decades raising families there. Very few of them, outside of the supposed value of their homes, are anything approaching "multi millionaires".
The Alphabet streets, where I grew up, was primarily the homes of engineers working for Hughes and Raytheon down in El Segundo and Long Beach. Not very many millionaires among them.
The Alphabet streets are now smoke and rubble, indistiguishable in your immediate POV from any hot war zone on earth.
And, you know what? So what if a bunch of them are actually Rich?
Is it any less sad, less traumatic, less horrifying to see a really rich old couple crying in front of the wind-blown ashes of their wedding album, the only place with pictures of 40 years ago, eloping in Reno because their parents wouldn't approve, then putting a down payment on a small bungalo in this small hillside community with the little money they'd managed to save, bringing home first one baby, then another, then throwing birthday parties, graduation parties, weddings...and pictures of those same children, now adults, bringing home the same thing, babies, only now grandchildren, through the same doorway, playing in the same yard, in the same room their mom or dad grew up in...
Watching as, somehow, the American Dream actually became real for them...and then watching it and every trace it ever existed vanishing in, literally hours.
Does it make it more sad and tragic if they're poor?
And it's nice of you to completely ignore the Altadena fire, and the Sunset Fire, and the half dozen others that impacted working class areas.
A whole lot easier to make your "progressive statement about reform" when you can point to the priveledged folks we supposedly are all against. Not so easy to point to a "fellow comrade" as an easy prop for your crusade.
As for the budget bullshit:
The LAFD's budget actually increased $50 million year over year. The debates over specific allocations were putting the rest of the city budget on hold, so they severed those conversations from the primary, and the allocation left in the primary budget was, in fact, less than the previous year...because the balance, plus the new year's increase was now a different financial conversation and allocation. Too many writers are looking for clickbait headlines who either don't live here or don't know how to read actual publicly-available documents.
Even the folks blasting this nonsense are forced to admit that the only "cuts" in the mainline budget were to: new civilian/office hires, the final stages of returning to pre-Covid levels of office admins; and pre-guaranteed overtime per pay period (i.e. even if there are no fires keeping them past their non-OT shift). Those were the debates holding up the final agreement, and not in a yes/no debate either, they were both going to happen, it was over exactly how much was going to happen in 2025. Neither of those things were at play here.
This "controversy" was just a normal Wednesday here. LA city and county governments are writhing snakepits, and absolutely no one says anything unless it puts a knife in someone else's back. First thing Wednesday morning, when we still didn't even know how bad things were, the next slate of mayoral candidates was already all over the local news spewing this bullshit, despite 100% knowing better.
And as for the "water running out" silliness:
1) Most of the Pacific Palisades and Altadena are in/on/at the base of steep hillsides. At a certain point, there's only so much water pressure you can generate against gravity.
2) Ground-based fire fighting i.e. hoses is almost never a primary defense against large-scale brush fires. The flames get 50-100 feet high within seconds, well away from any drivable terrain, let alone roads with a source of water like a hydrant or even a pool, and are being pushed by winds that at their slowest are pushing it 50mph, with gusts up to 80mph. Show me a hose that can do anything against that, assuming you can get one out there.
3) The primary defense against Santa Ana-driven brushfires has always, for the last couple decades, been arial based: helicopters and tanker airplanes dropping immense amounts of water and fire retardant on hot spots and to set fire lines, out in the wilderness where these fires start, with the usually successful goal of stopping it before it reaches homes or businesses.
But the winds were, again, blowing at an average of around 50mph, gusts well up above 80mpg, and fire/heat induced local, randomly-switching wind gusts of up to 100mph.
No one, not even an insane pilot, wants to try flying in weather like that, not when the job description is "get within 50 feet (not yards, feet) of these hillsides", and yet, some incredibly brave pilots tried. And the water and fire retardant aerosolized and blew away. Again, 50+ mph winds.
Also, humidity was well below 20%, generally below 10% in the fire areas, especially with the strong, desert-dry winds basically recycling the entire atmosphere every few seconds. Single-digit humidity...the very air is thermodynamically ripping apart the liquids.
Also also, back to those winds: they grounded not just the helicopters and aircraft dropping water and retardant, they grounded all of the spotter helicopters and aircraft that are really the first line of defense, constantly sweeping over areas, looking for tiny sparks before they get a chance to grow, and calling in the resources to put them out. None of them could be in the air.
LAFD was left with alerts from pre-deployed ground forces, phone reports from residents, satellite heat maps, and -- no joke -- phone videos from aircraft flying way the hell above LA that were being posted to social media.
And, in many cases, by seeing the flames outside their station and realizing the last few people not already suited up and out there would have to evacuate the goddamn FIRE STATION before a FIRE STATION BURNED DOWN.
And one final note: residents, especially in the areas near hilsides with brush, spend a fortune on brush clearance and fireproofing...everything's made out of plaster and concrete...the codes to build anything new in southern California, especially near known fire areas, are absurd.
That helps a lot if a fire is creeping slowly along the ground. That's useless when the sky looks like someone turned a firehose on, only sparks and embers were what was shooting everywhere, soaking everything for hundreds of yards...some of those embers set off massive flare ups over a mile away from the main fires.
There was nothing to stop the flames from ripping down the hillsides and into the neigborhoods and business districts.
Look: a standard large house fire requires 2-3 engines to put out.
Tuesday night, let's say you were in the Palisades, north end, not 10 minutes after the fire hit the northernmost line of buildings.
20 houses are completely engulfed, every one you can see around you in all directions. 20 more have their roofs on fire, and every 45 seconds your radio is barking about a new flare up, blocks away, a tree caught an ember and is going up, raining new embers on three nearby roofs, we need 5 more engines over here STAT...tell me exactly how much additional pressure in the hoses and how many fire engines -- and trained firefighters putting their lives at risk -- would have changed the outcome.
.
The entire LA government is corrupt as fuck and I'd like to punch that smiling muppet mayor in her glad-handling face. And I went to school with the Resnicks' son, and he's a vastly bigger dick than his parents, which is saying something. I'm not arguing against water rights/hoarding, self-serving politics, or anything else this post is trying to hijack.
But this was a once-in-a-lifetime wind event -- insert Homer's "Worst wind event of your life *so far*" meme, thank you anthropomorphic climate change -- and not something we as a species are equipped to deal with yet.
I call myself left of progressive, and am sympathetic to the arguments you are putting forward.
But do not drape your "hmm, all the clues seem to add up to yet again support my position" antics over the smoking embers of my hometown.
