The Guardian: The forgotten oil ads that told us climate change was nothing
The fossil fuel industry has perpetrated a multi-decade, multibillion dollar disinformation, propaganda and lobbying campaign to delay climate action by confusing the public and policymakers
The Onion: NFT Investor Reminds Skeptics Everything Else In World Stupid and Meaningless Too
backlash directed at the waste of NFTs could just as easily be directed at… deodorant, Christianity, hamsters, the nuclear family, World War I, ice cubes, Europe, Thursdays, …
Saturday’s beer: Founders Brewing’s KBS Cinnamon Vanilla Stout
pretty tasty, very strong 🍺
The Texas Forest Service estimates the tree to be over 1,000 years old, while other recent estimates place it nearer to 2,000 years old
finished Joanne Cacciatore’s Bearing the Unbearable, a beautiful book. ideas about “stretching & strengthening the grief-bearing muscles”, plus kindness projects, stood out. if nothing else, the title encapsulates the experience about as perfectly as anything I’ve heard 📚
McSweeney’s: My Obsession with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Is Totally Normal
My responses and attitudes toward Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez totally fall on a sane spectrum of human comportment, so there’s nothing weird, deranged, or dangerously repressed about me, no sir-ee!
Saturday’s beer: Harpoon Brewery’s The Bock Hog
⭐️__ __
I love a bock, and was excited about this one, but it has a slightly odd, too-sweet note for my taste 🍺
Rebecca Solnit: Why does the media keep saying this election was a loss for Democrats? It wasn’t
Democrats are analyzed completely differently from Republicans… Republicans don’t govern and [the media] can’t seem to report on what a party doesn’t do and doesn’t talk about
finished Gods of Jade and Shadow, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia, it was such a charming story. it has a unique voice, not to mention the setting and Mayan mythological background. I really enjoyed spending time with Casiopea on her amazing adventure 📚
Saturday’s beer: Vista Brewing’s Middle Trinity
⭐️⭐️⭐️
a very nice local Tripel 🍺
this was fascinating: My Garden of a Thousand Bees on PBS:
A wildlife cameraman spends his time during the coronavirus pandemic lockdown filming the bees in his urban garden and discovers the many diverse species and personalities that exist in this insect family
feeling probably a little too self-congratulatory about this (from Overcast; i.e., I’m caught up on all my podcasts!)
tarot for introspection interests me
Tarot might be seen in kind [with meditation, yoga, etc.], says Dore – as an intervention rooted in a mystic tradition, like mindfulness. It is possible to accept “other ways of knowing”, she suggests, without denying or undermining science
I have an Instagram account export dump, from which I’d like to pull the photos, dates, and captions. but it appears that the latter bits are only available in a single (non-chronological!) HTML file. anyone know of existing apps or code that parses this mess? /cc @manton
and everywhere the rocks are falling
but you are just another piece
with all the birds that make a circle
are you not more than one of these?
Little Miami, Wussy
this second season of Ted Lasso was, for me, not nearly as enjoyable & fantastic as the first. if there were a third ready to start right now, not sure I‘d bother 😕
dawn walk in Victoria
Saturday’s beers: an Oktoberfest showdown between Rahr & Sons, St. Arnold’s, & Sierra Nevada
⭐️⭐️⭐️
(they’re all good, and quite similar; Rahr & Sons won by a nose. but really, I won. love Oktoberfest) 🍺
saw the Waxahatchee show last night that was originally scheduled for September 27… 2020
Waxahatchee, Lilacs
that voice
almost done (re-)reading The Silmarillion, but couldn’t pass up this lovely big illustrated hardcover at Half-Price Books today. the bigger, lay-flat map inside the cover (pictured with the less-good creased map in my old copy) is worth the price alone. Doriath > Driath
today’s beer: Thirsty Planet Brewing’s Smittlefest
⭐️⭐️⭐️
I love a good Märzen, and this is a good Märzen 🍺
new post: Mary, in which I relate the most heartbreaking thing that’s ever happened to me (“…so far!”, I would have joked, before this)
I’ve rarely ever written much of a very personal nature here, and I’m still not sure I want to now. But I’ve experienced a loss so profound that I feel I have to at least note the fact of it, whether or not I end up writing more about it than this. I want to get back to posting whether I liked this book, or that beer, or how my writing is going, but how can I, after this?
Anyway, it’s this: in the early-morning hours of Friday, July 30, our 23-year-old daughter Mary was killed in a car crash here in Austin. She was a passenger, and the car she was in was hit by a reckless driver. Dumbfoundingly, the other three occupants of her car were fine, but she never regained consciousness. The at-fault driver also died, after more than a week on life support.
A week after the accident we held a memorial service for her, in the morning. That afternoon we got the news that my (unvaccinated) brother-in-law had lost his weeks-long battle with Covid-19. A week later we were attending his funeral.
That was four weeks ago yesterday, and I don’t think I could put this unimaginable hell into words even if I wanted to. There are at least occasional periods of time now that are bearable, and even, every now and then, a faint glimmer of being able to give the tiniest fuck about life or the future. That’s progress, I suppose.
One thing I did (god knows how; I barely remember it) was make a simple system by which those of us who miss her can send texts to a special phone number (Twilio, natch) that then get published to a website (Micro.blog) and cross-posted to a social media network (Twitter, yuck, but that’s where her friends are). The messages are here, with a detailed explanation here; Micro.bloggers can follow her through @maryg and Twitter folk can find the crossposts on @WeMissUMary. I hope/plan to publish the Node.js source at some point; there is a lot of room for improvement.
Other things are going on, too. It’s bizarre and frankly more than a little rude how life continues on, good and bad, despite this level of debilitating tragedy. But maybe now I can post a mention of those things here and not feel like I’m pretending this didn’t happen.
For a start: I liked this book, and that beer, and my writing was a finalist in a contest. Big damn deal.
And it probably won’t get easier
Just easier to hide
Prepare for an aching
The rest of your life
it was: she says this, or she does this, or she thinks this. she loves that or she hates that.
but now it’s: she said this, or she did this, or she thought this. she loved that or she hated that.
how the fuck am I supposed to be able handle that?
Saturday’s beer: Abbaye de Maredsous Tripel
⭐️⭐️⭐️
This Belgian Tripel is delicious. In other similarly unexpected news: the sun is hot, and Lucy pulls away the football at the last second 🍺
Saturday beer: St. Arnold’s Old Fashioned
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Stumbled across this at Spec’s today and wow is it good. I don’t remember ever having a tasty boozy beer like this from St. A’s before 🍺
beautiful night for a home game at McKalla Place ⚽️
clocked another good chunk of NaNoWriMo editing hours today, for a total of 12 so far. with lots of stuff on the work and personal calendars this month, I wanted to make a strong start 📝
so, one silly problem with tracking my 36-hour Camp NaNoWriMo goal as 36 “words” is that I can’t enter fractional values. I could change to 3600… but I think I’ll just remember that I have a bonus half-hour to log tomorrow (on top of 4(!) today) 📝
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