"The game is just gunsmoke and sharpened knives."
Mostly sunny today. Our high was 77F. A good start to March 2024. And I try not the think about what sort pof hellscape Trump and the MAGA lunatics will have transformaed the world into by next March.
Producive today. I did a little over 1k words of "A Nameless Person of Unknown Origin," which I hope to have finished by Friday, so I can put out the January 2024 issue of the digest this weekend. I left messages for Jun and Merrilee, but it was fucking Easter, so it's not like I expected anyone to answer their phone. I had an email exchange with Sonya, her helping me once again with the Latin for a new binomen (it was Ancient Greek Last time) for one of the two new species of plioplatecarpin mosasaur to be described in MP 2.0. And speaking of which, I started a description of the quardrates. We have specimens from Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Ah, what else? I did some work on the Bashi Marl sample, which I'm trying to finish, because all my paleo' time needs to go to MP 2.0 at this point. Oh, I email Drew about two of the turtle papers we're supposed to do.
That was today.
I was half asleep all day, it seemed, though I slept halfway decently the night befoore.
As I finish up Yascha Mounk's very, very worthwhile The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, I find myself wanting to write an afterword for Bright Dead Star, dealing with current censorship, especially with the pehnomenon of censorship from progressives and the Left. It's something I still have trouble wrapping my brain around. When I was in college, free speech was sacred, and we fought for it, even speech we disagreed with it. Now...this fucking mess. So, that's something I could write that needs writing, but thre's the time issue and, too, I doubt I could do the job even half as well as many others have done, and it's not like I'd stop students at Harvard or Yale or Brown or Berkeley from acting like the followers of Mao Zedong or Adolf Hitler or any numbered of demented American televangelists, deciding for everyone else what is and is not fit for public consumption. Once upon a time, it was the Right that posed the greatest threat to free speech, to freedom of expression, to art, even science. The idea that anyone on the Left would be acting like this was all but unthinkable. A lot has changed in thirty years.
Anyway...
Did I mention we're watching Californication again? We are. It's a breath of fresh, foul-mouthed, utterly "not okay" air in this age of the New Puritans. The show pretty much implodes after Season One, but lord, the inappropriateness in glorious. I never thought I'd miss the liberty of 2007.
Please visit the Dreaming Squid Sundries shop. Thanks.
Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast
11:34 a.m.
Producive today. I did a little over 1k words of "A Nameless Person of Unknown Origin," which I hope to have finished by Friday, so I can put out the January 2024 issue of the digest this weekend. I left messages for Jun and Merrilee, but it was fucking Easter, so it's not like I expected anyone to answer their phone. I had an email exchange with Sonya, her helping me once again with the Latin for a new binomen (it was Ancient Greek Last time) for one of the two new species of plioplatecarpin mosasaur to be described in MP 2.0. And speaking of which, I started a description of the quardrates. We have specimens from Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Ah, what else? I did some work on the Bashi Marl sample, which I'm trying to finish, because all my paleo' time needs to go to MP 2.0 at this point. Oh, I email Drew about two of the turtle papers we're supposed to do.
That was today.
I was half asleep all day, it seemed, though I slept halfway decently the night befoore.
As I finish up Yascha Mounk's very, very worthwhile The Identity Trap: A Story of Ideas and Power in Our Time, I find myself wanting to write an afterword for Bright Dead Star, dealing with current censorship, especially with the pehnomenon of censorship from progressives and the Left. It's something I still have trouble wrapping my brain around. When I was in college, free speech was sacred, and we fought for it, even speech we disagreed with it. Now...this fucking mess. So, that's something I could write that needs writing, but thre's the time issue and, too, I doubt I could do the job even half as well as many others have done, and it's not like I'd stop students at Harvard or Yale or Brown or Berkeley from acting like the followers of Mao Zedong or Adolf Hitler or any numbered of demented American televangelists, deciding for everyone else what is and is not fit for public consumption. Once upon a time, it was the Right that posed the greatest threat to free speech, to freedom of expression, to art, even science. The idea that anyone on the Left would be acting like this was all but unthinkable. A lot has changed in thirty years.
Anyway...
Did I mention we're watching Californication again? We are. It's a breath of fresh, foul-mouthed, utterly "not okay" air in this age of the New Puritans. The show pretty much implodes after Season One, but lord, the inappropriateness in glorious. I never thought I'd miss the liberty of 2007.
Please visit the Dreaming Squid Sundries shop. Thanks.
Later Tater Beans,
Aunt Beast
11:34 a.m.