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new year, new insurance

I gave Capsule my new insurance information, and then had them deliver a prescription.

I will need/use the inhaler, but this is also confirmation that yes, I (still) have prescription drug coverage.

Other than that, not a great day. Fingertips are improving, but I had a sudden nosebleed while sitting quietly on the couch an hour ago. *sigh*

Entry tags:

farm share

Winter share, 6 of 11

3.5 pounds of sweet potatoes
3 pounds of beets
3 pounds of purple starburst daikon
a big bag of spinach (1.5 pounds, maybe?)
a pint of Real Pickles kimchi, swapped for more sweet potatoes due to their lack of kosher certification, alas

First thoughts: I need to buy alliums. Maybe a pot of split pea soup with carrots and sweet potatoes. Carrot-daikon slaw. Maybe look into some kind of steamed shredded daikon + flour thing that then gets fried, that someone mentioned at the distribution site. Someone else mentioned beet muhammara, which also sounds interesting. Pickle all the things (ok, not the leaves or the sweet potato). Add a handful of spinach to any sautes I make.

And though I can access most of the site just fine, when I try to look at my archive/calendar, I get a message about not being able to access the site in Mississippi, due to the court case. Which I knew about, but neither I nor my computer has ever been in Mississippi; I haven’t even left MA in the last year! So something’s hinky somewhere.

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ICE murdered a woman in the streets today. You need to know, and you need to tell others.

ICE shot a woman, believed but not confirmed to be an American and confirmed not to be a target of their raids, to death in the streets today, murdering her. They are lying about it, calling her a terrorist and lying about what happened. Tricia McLaughlin in particular is lying about what happened. ICE and Tricia McLaughlin have lied many times, irrefutably, in the past, about ICE violence; this is yet another time.

There is third-party video. I have reviewed it several times. It matches reported eyewitness descriptions taken at the scene. In it, the ICE agent shoots while fully clear of any vehicle – having in fact stepped back from the vehicle to make room to raise his pistol – as the vehicle is moving away from him. Eyewitnesses say he shot directly into the vehicle, from the side, at a near-right-angle (at first), which matches what can be seen in the video itself.

Here’s one posting. If necessary, I have a copy and can make more copies if needed. I think these’ll be disappeared if we don’t put them enough places.

The fash are building a lie, a “false narrative.” That’s just extra syllables for “lie,” one that they’ll all pretend to believe. Debunk it at every turn.

ICE murdered a woman in the streets today for funsies and because they were mad about it, and now they’re lying about what they did, while this woman is indeed quite dead.

ETA: The original video has been moved behind moderation and is no longer visible without a Bluesky account. This is a different video from a different angle, unfortunately lacking earlier context.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Current Mood: insomniac

You've seen this one before

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Current Mood: exhausted

"Nationwide Trans Youth Care Ban Incoming"

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Entry tags:

music

Yaybahar III Nadiri [music]

2026 Jan 6: Görkem Şen (Yaybahar on YT): Yaybahar III Nadiri

Watch on YouTube

The description text:

The essence of gold was rare, he conquered with his virtue, offered his gifts and fell behind the sun...

Dedicated to the soul of my dear friend's father, Nadir Oğuz...

I am surmising that "Nadiri" means "Of Nadir". Yaybahar is the instrument, the artist is its inventor:

The name yaybahar (pronounced /jajba'har/) has Turkish origin. It is a composite of two words: yay means a "string" or a "coiled string" and bahar means the season "spring." According to Gorkem Sen, the name is derived from the idea of a new life or a new beginning. [1]

I assume this is the third one of its kind the artist has made.

Artist's website: https://www.gorkemsen.com/

Current Mood: anxious

Three bits of note

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Entry tags:

Updating

I updated my sticky post with: PSA: if you get an email out of the blue that is supposedly from me, offering to help you with marketing or other publisher services, or asking for money, it is not me, it is a scammer. Also, if you see me on Facebook or Threads or XTwitter, that's not me either.

This is a very common scam now, one of the many scams aimed at aspiring and new writers.

***

I'm still sick, ugh

***

Nice article on Queen Demon on the Daily KOS:

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/1/5/2361356/-The-Language-of-the-Night-Martha-Wells-takes-on-colonization

One of Wells’ most compelling gifts as a writer is the way she interrogates trauma, and trauma is very much in evidence in her recent works, especially in both Murderbot and The Rising World. Where the Murderbot stories form an enslavement narrative as personal journey and healing, the Rising World series applies a wider cultural lens to trauma and loss.

Kai has seen his world ripped apart twice: the way to the underneath, the world of his birth, is shut off; the world of his above existence, the world of the Saredi, is also gone, both of them murdered by the Hierarchs. (You could argue that the third traumatizing loss-of-world is losing Bashasa, but that lies in the gap between past and present narratives.) In the past narrative, a vanquished Kai himself is imprisoned in the Summer Halls until Bashasa frees him and he joins the ad hoc rebellion.

Current Music: The Advisory Circle, "Inner Activity"

Entry tags:

patreon

Now let's listen to a conversation between two English actors on the subject of Warships Week

Doubtful as it may be under present conditions to find encouragement in anything of military origin unless it's the USS Princeton in 1844, about twenty-seven seconds into the two minutes' patriotism of Warship Week Appeal (1942) I cracked up.

Two hundred feet exactly of no-credits 35 mm, the object in question is a trailer produced for the Ministry of Information, essentially the same concept as the film tags of WWI: a micro-dose of propaganda appended to a newsreel as part of a larger campaign, in this case a sort of public information skit in which it is supposed that Noël Coward on the Denham sets of In Which We Serve (1942) is approached by Leslie Howard, slouching characteristically on with his hands in his pockets and his scarf twisted carelessly label-out, anxious to discuss a problem of National Savings. "How do you think we can make an appeal so it won't quite seem like an appeal?" With limited screen time to realize their meta conceit, the two actor-directors get briskly down to explaining the mechanics of the scheme to the British public with the shot-reverse-shot patter of a double act on the halls, but the trailer has already dropped its most memorable moment ahead of all its instructions and slogans, even the brief time it rhymes. Diffident as one end of his spectrum of nerd heroes, Howard apologizes for the interruption, excuses it with its relevance to naval business, and trails off with the usual form of words, "I'm sure you won't mind—" to which Coward responds smoothly, "I'm delighted to see you. And I know perfectly well—as we rehearsed it so carefully—that you've come to interview me about Warships Week." He doesn't even bother to hold for a laugh as Leslie snorts around his unlit cigarette. It doesn't all feel like a bit. The interjection may or may not have been scripted, but Coward's delivery is lethally demure and his scene partner's reaction looks genuine; for one, it's much less well-timed or dignified than the smile he uses to support a later, slightly obligatory joke about the income tax, which makes it that much more endearing. It's funny to me for a slant, secondhand reason, too, that has nothing to do with the long friendship between the two men or further proof of Noël's deadpan for the ages: a dancer with whom my mother once worked had been part of the company of Howard's 1936 Hamlet and like all the other small parts, whenever her back was to the audience and the Hollywood star was stuck facing the footlights, she tried to corpse him. One night she finally succeeded. Consequently and disproportionately, watching him need the length of a cigarette-lighting to get his face back, I thought of her story which I hadn't in years and may have laughed harder than Leslie Howard deserved. If it's any consolation to him, the way his eyes close right up like a cat's is beautiful, middle-aged and underslept. It promotes the illusion that a real person might say a phrase like "in these grim days when we've got our backs to the wall" outside of an address to the nation.

Not much consolation to the MOI, Warship Week Appeal accomplishes its goal in that while it doesn't mention for posterity that a community would adopt the ship it funded, the general idea of the dearth of "ships—more ships and still more ships" and the communal need to pay down for them as efficiently as possible comes through emphatically. It's so much more straightforward, in fact, than I associate with either of its differently masked actors, I'd love to know who wrote it, but the only other information immediately available is that the "Ronnie" whom Coward is conferring with when Howard courteously butts in is Ronald Neame. Given the production dates of their respective pictures, it's not difficult to pretend that Howard just popped over from the next sound stage where he was still shooting The First of the Few (1942), although he is clearly in star rather than director mode because even if he's in working clothes, he is conspicuously minus his glasses. What can I tell you? I got it from the Imperial War Museum and for two minutes and thirteen seconds it cheered me up. Lots of things to look at these days could do much, much worse. This interview brought to you by my appealing backers at Patreon.

Current Music: Fast Blood, "Rut"

How am I supposed to know what's real?

After a full week without water in the kitchen, the plumber cameth on half an hour's notice from the property manager and was horrified to hear about it, but he was swift and competent and we have a new and working faucet, which was all the problem turned out to be. Hestia made herself invisible in the bedroom throughout the proceedings. I washed a fork without first boiling water and it felt like a big deal.

I just finished reading David Hare's A Map of the World (1983), whose device of examining an interpersonal-political knot through the successive filters of the roman à clef, the screen version, and the memories of the participants reminded me obviously of similar exercises in metafiction and retrospect by Tom Stoppard and Michael Frayn, double-cast for an effect at the end approaching timeslip such as works almost strictly on stage. I did not expect to find some fragments preserved in an episode of The South Bank Show, but there were some of the scenes with Roshan Seth, John Matshikiza, Bill Nighy, Diana Quick. I wish I thought it meant there were a complete broadcast I could watch, but I'm not even finding it got the BBC Radio 3 treatment. More immediately, it reminded me of how many of the stories I read early were about stories, their propagation and mutation, their conventions, their shifting distances from the facts. "And, in time, only the bards knew the truth of it."

The problem with the denaturing of language is that when I say to

spatch that the political situation is insane, I don't mean it's a little far-fetched, I mean it is driven by wants and processes that are not rational and it is exhausting to be trapped inside someone else's illness.

Entry tags:

what to do now

Stop using oil.

That’s it. That’s what to do.

Stop using oil. Stop using natural gas, too. Stop. The sooner you can stop, the better. Do what it takes. I don’t know what that is for any individual – for you – but do it.

I know it’s work. I’m not saying, “here’s the easy no impact thing you can do to feel better about yourself,” I’m saying “this is what you need to do if you want to actually do something,” and those are very different statements. It’s a lift, and it’s a heavy lift, but it’s what to do now.

Being work – being difficult – doesn’t change that it needs to happen. Stopping the Nazis in World War II was a heavy lift too. It was work, it was difficult, and it was very literally very very deadly. Millions of people died. Millions more got fucked up for life. Still needed to happen, just like this still needs to happen now. And both the deaths and the fuckery were going to happen anyway.

So stop using oil.

I started saying this literally decades ago, talking about US adventurism in the Middle East. For the money people – the ones who matter – it was then and is now about oil. You want the US out of the Middle East, do everything you can to stop oil consumption. Starve the beast, and eventually the beast will weaken and die. It’s not fast and it’s not easy and it’s not glamorous, but it’s what will work.

Sure, you can talk about the lunatic fundamentalists who want to start Armageddon and end the world to bring back Jesus – fuck, I hate that typing that out is relevant and important – but without the money people using them as muscle, they’re a bunch of flea-picking determinedly-ignorant dipshits feeling up snakes in strip-mall storefronts. Fuck ’em. The reality is that fossil fuel companies are ass-deep in fascism, and always have been, so:

Stop. Using. Oil.

Internalise that. The problem is oil and the people who extract, refine, and sell it. It’s also natural gas and coal and any other fossil fuel, but mostly, it’s the oil.

Stop using oil.

Hit those goddamn breaks, slow down, and then just. Fucking. Stop. Using. Oil.

Some of that’s easy, some of it’s not, and it’s not fast. Lots of people can tell you ways how, including me, but don’t get me wrong – I’m not a saint on this; our furnace is still natural gas. I want to fix that, and we’re actively stockpiling money to do so, but it’s going to take time. It just is. But we’re actually actively working towards it, and we have been for a while.

Not just at home, either. If things go right at the work I don’t talk about online – ever – we’ll be cutting fossil fuel consumption there by another 91% by late this summer.

Thanks to me.

It’s taken ages. We’ve already cut use by about 77%, thanks again – I stress – to my efforts. This new 91% cut will be 91% of what’s left over after all that. It’ll be a 98% cut from where we started, years ago.

If things go right – and there are supplier questions so it might not go right – we’ll be throwing that switch mid-year. For good. It’ll have been years of effort but we’ll have gone from over two thousand gallons of oil a year to

FUCKING ZERO

…with the remaining 2% being natural gas. (We have a path out of that, as well. But the oil comes first.)

There’s nothing unique about my position in this. My accomplishment can be repeated by others, I am just saying.

The end result of not using oil will be much better than what we have now. Some of the intermediate steps will be improvements, too. Some won’t. Some, people just won’t like. Surveys show Americans want to stop climate change but they also want to keep using gas forever and I’m fucking sorry, but that’s just not how reality works.

Until people internalise that they have to stop using oil, I don’t know how much anything else matters.

Step one is stop using oil. (And natural gas.)

It’s also step 10, step 30, step 3000.

You want to do something?

Stop. Using. Oil.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Title Formulations

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Current Mood: curious

Andrew Zimmern picks tastiest and least tasty animals

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Current Music: Phil Ochs, "Cops of the World"

And we'll find you a leader that you can elect

This administration has run so hard from the start on leaded fantasies, the presence of a fossil fuel in its latest scream for the headlines seems macabrely apropos. Oil is indeed a lucratively unrenewable resource, but aren't those equally heady fumes of the Banana Wars and Neptune Spear? In my own throwback to the twentieth century, I haven't been able to get Phil Ochs out of my head. It was in another of his songs that I first heard of United Fruit. I live in endless echoes, but I am tired of these threadbare loops of empire that were already sticky shed and vinegar when another fluffer of American exceptional stupidity hung out his banner of a mission very much not accomplished. Is it the Crusades this time or Manifest Destiny? War Plan Red hasn't panned out so far, but we can always rebrand the Monroe Doctrine. Colombia! Cuba! Greenland! Daddy's shadow and Deus vult. "Every generation of Centauri mourns for the golden days when their power was like unto the gods! It's counterproductive! I mean, why make history if you fail to learn by it?" I was thirteen when I heard that line and I understood the question. Who knew I was going to spend the rest of my life finding out just how many people were never even interested in trying?

Entry tags:

what i’m hearing

What I’m hearing – and hopefully it’s wrong, but it’s what I’m hearing – is that Republicans in Congress know that this is all a hellish dictatorial evil nightmare, but that even now, they won’t cross Trump. One or two will, but not many and not enough. I don’t know that it’s true, but maybe it is.

If you have Republican Representatives or Senator(s), it is your job TODAY to make them fear YOU more than they fear HIM.

This is some serious business last chance shit right here, okay?

Get on it. Good luck.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.

Current Mood: crappy

Entry tags:

state of the world

(no subject)

The skin on the tips of my fingers has been splitting again (as it does in winter even if I try to use enough lotion) and I discovered yesterday evening that my left middle finger and thumb both hurt to touch right now, which makes lifting even light-weight things painful or difficult. Fortunately I don't live alone, and Adrian ct up my salmon for me.

Today has been if anything worse. Mousing Ok, a few tasks are OK, I managed several PT exercises but it has been a hard day. Typing, including comments, is particularly bad.

Current Mood: determined

Three Signalboosts

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Current Music: Ancient Hostility, "Hammer"

I'm aggrieved the hours I've lost I could have spent with my love

Before the news was overtaken by this latest and gratuitous moving fast and breaking of the world, I discovered that on Boxing Day there had been a three-alarm fire on the working waterfront of Portland's Custom House Wharf. I used to spend a lot of time there with my grandmother. She would buy her fish nowhere but from the Harbor Fish Market, which in the '80's and '90's had the great dried skin of a sturgeon on its wall along with its charts of catches and soundings and a wet-planked floor through which the harbor itself could occasionally be seen lapping in a wrack-green brindle of light. It smelled at once like open water and the clean insides of fish. It was spared the blaze; other addresses were not. Between the icing temperatures and the flashpaper of the buildings, the firefighting efforts sound even more heroic since no one seems to have died, but the damage beyond the total losses of gear and business remains significant. The Maine Coast Fishermen's Association has been taking donations for their support and partnered with a local restaurant toward the same end plus T-shirts. It is a small shoring-up of the world and it matters. "When I say charity, I don't mean, 'I've got a sixpence I don't want. You can have it.' I mean, 'I've got a sixpence I do want. You can still have it.'"