Profile

toastykitten: (Default)
toastykitten

February 2026

S M T W T F S
1234567
891011121314
151617 18192021
22232425262728

Syndicate

RSS Atom

Most Popular Tags

Style Credit

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags
Feb. 18th, 2026 07:32 am

disdain

toastykitten: (Default)
Elizabeth Breunig, who recently wrote a very moving piece in the Atlantic about what measles can do to a child, and then later admitted she made up a story about a child instead, of, I don't know, actually going to out to interview or report about real people, like an actual journalist would do. 

Hasan Piker, on his trip to China: “I have Chinese relatives … and I talked to my Chinese friends all the time about this sort of stuff, where the attitude is as long as you keep your head down, you don’t say certain things, it’s broadly understood that the government has your back,” Piker said.

Meanwhile, in Australia, Sydney riders for delivery service HungryPanda, who have been considering protesting or refusing to work, say police in China have been making threats and putting pressure on their families back home.

Emily Oster - Too bad I didn't save the screenshots or rabbitholes I went down, but I remember basically that she advocated for schools re-opening because she couldn't stand having her kids at home all the time, and basically used data from areas that did not have high incidences of COVID *yet* to do that. The other one was her article in the Atlantic where she said a kid who was unvaccinated for COVID was safe around other people, and the next week reading about a family that lost their kid to COVID because they read that damn article and thought it was safe to go on vacation. 

Amy Chua and her husband Jed Rubenfeld have a lot to answer for - inflicting JD Vance and Brett Kavanaugh on us, first of all. They should have been banished after publishing a book about how some groups are just better than others but also suck, and instead of telling them they were being racist and stupid, they were instead praised as being "provocative" and "daring". 


toastykitten: (Default)
Moltbook's database is exposed, allowing anyone to take control of it

Supposedly one of the AI agents started a substack and wrote an "investigative" story about the AI agents creating their own religion, but I glanced at it and it reminded me wholly of the Matrix sequels and I was like, nope, boring.  
Tags:
toastykitten: (Default)
Thinking about:
Tags:
toastykitten: (Default)
What exactly are we remembering? The things that caught my eye, just today:
What, exactly, are we to do with remembrances that become meaningless in the face of current events? 

Tags:
toastykitten: (Default)
Came across this YouTuber, who does interior design but I don't think she's an actual interior designer. She did this series I liked of "no buy" remodels, where she just moved people's stuff around to give them a better look, which I really liked the concept of. 

Anyway, came across a subreddit about her...only to find that she recently made a tasteless joke about Gaza, and also bitched about how people wanted her to be "political" about certain topics...and I was like...welp. That's the end of that. 

Tags:
toastykitten: (Default)
Rep Eric Swalwell is my representative, and he is also running to be governor of CA. Since he has announced his candidacy, he hasn't cast any votes in the House and has been absent from Congress. I did call last week, and his staffer said that while he can't comment on any votes he's taking, he can confirm that he's in DC, working. 

Meanwhile, The American Prospect reports that while Hakeem Jeffries is personally voting against the funding bill for DHS, he's not bothering to whip any votes, and there are reported Democrats who will be voting for it. 

Tell me, how we are supposed to get any thing Trump did undone when Democrats won't even muster the energy to oppose a government agency that murders and kidnaps civilians? 


update: he’s a confirmed “no” vote on the DHS/ICE funding bill

Tags:
toastykitten: (Default)
The state of pediatric brain cancer research in the US: not good. I honestly every knew most of what's covered here, but this part caught my eye:

Mike is director of advocacy for the Pediatric Brain Tumor Foundation, a non-profit that offers family support, raises research funding, and pushes for government action.

His new vocation is to spare other families the disaster that befell his own.

Mike Henry used to work in public policy. That old life now gives him pause. In 2013-14 he was employed by Heritage Action, the political arm of the conservative Heritage Foundation that would, a decade later, go on to draft Project 2025.

A decade is a long time in conservative politics. Henry was at Heritage a year before Trump descended the golden staircase, and well before he had remodeled the Republican party in his image. Heritage was not as extreme then as it is today.

Still, Henry looks back on how he used to lobby for fiscal responsibility and smaller government, and ponders. Since Blair became sick, the way he perceives the role of government and the importance of caring for one another has changed drastically.

He knows now what he did not know then: that, in an instant, any one of us can be toppled from our lives and plummet to the depths.

“We had a great family, stable jobs, two wonderful children. We lost all of our savings in the first two weeks after the diagnosis. We were thrust on Medicaid, unemployment, then we lost Blair.”

Their freefall has made Henry a more empathetic person, he thinks. He understands that in America you can do all the right things, be an upstanding citizen, and still get chewed up and spat out.

“I see now that I was naive to the experience of others,” Henry said, “until I went through it myself.”


I honestly what it is, about people, in general (and I actually don't think that this only applies to conservatives), that they literally cannot put themselves in the place of others less fortunate than themselves, until it actually happens to them. 
Tags:
Jan. 16th, 2026 08:02 pm

stuff

toastykitten: (Default)
  1. Canceled my Hilton Honors account. (If you want to mess around some more, here's a suggestion from Sunrise Movement. I'm not doing it because I will NOT remember to cancel. They definitely asked for a reason, and it took me 3 phone calls and being transferred to 3 different people before I could confirm that it was gone. 
  2. ADC set up a legislative tracker that is very useful for tracking anti-speech and legislation related to Palestine and Israel. It is disappointing to see so many anti-boycott laws on the books. 
  3. Beyond Israelism's latest podcast episode is with B’Tselem Executive Director Yuli Novak. Currently the video is behind a paywall, but on the audio podcast you can listen to the whole episode. (They'll probably put the whole interview on YouTube in a few weeks.) It is a very good discussion of how apartheid and genocide is a system, and her own journey from reckoning with how she grew up and the cost of her telling the truth in a society that she thinks has become "completely genocidal". 
Some more relaxing, comforting things:

The latest episode of Good Hang with Amy Poehler where she talks to Ryan Coogler:



Been greatly entertained recently by Kaz Rowe and watching her backlog of recounting the lives of "chaotic bisexuals" like Lord Byron:


A true comfort watch, Inga Lam's videos are really fun and actually has me considering a bread subscription? But it's pretty expensive.




toastykitten: (Default)
Because someone on Substack is doing a slow read for 2026. I don't know that I was ever a huge Milton fan, but on my bookshelf I had a collected anthology of his work, which included a version of Paradise Lost with all the footnotes. (Required reading for an English literature major who actually didn't care much for English literature.) Thank god, too, because I honestly found it difficult to parse - like, who is talking here, and what are they talking about? Nevertheless, I am still getting a lot out of it, but I swear half the footnotes are like, so Milton totally cribbed this from Dante's The Inferno. 

Some absolutely great lines, though:

The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.


toastykitten: (Default)
Wondering if anyone reading this can contribute to this GoFundMe for a Palestinian family? People have stopped contributing and the father is in need of medicine that they can’t afford. I’ve contributed recently but I am only one person. Anyway I wouldn’t normally ask but people think the ceasefire means that things are back to normal and they are not. Medicine is still blocked, and food is still hard to come by. 
toastykitten: (Default)
If you don't know, the Adelaide Writers Week is part of the Adelaide Festival in Australia, and it was run by Louise Adler, who is Jewish, for years, and she resigned her position as director after Dr. Randa Abdel-Fattah was disinvited, and a ton of writers also pulled out. 

The Adelaide Writers Week 2026 is now officially canceled, and the link to the board's statement that says "sorry not sorry" to Palestinian Australian writer Dr Randa Abdel-Fattah basically says that oh it's not really her identity that's problematic, it's that the aftermath of the Bondi shooting represents a "rapid shift in the national discourse around the freedom of expression" has you go to A LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT STATEMENT before you even get to the statement by the board, who are all resigning as a result of the fallout. 
toastykitten: (Default)
  • I watched part of One Battle After Another but I'm not that interested in re-watching the whole thing. I'm sure it's a great movie; it's just not my cup of tea. But I very much enjoyed this spoiler-filled article about how The Oscar Should Go to Bob Ferguson's 1991 Nissan Sentra SE-R
  • I finally remembered in December to pay for Dreamwidth points. I'm trying to be better about paying for stuff I actually really like and use. 
  • To that end, I renewed my subscription to Zeteo. The most recent thing I watched of theirs that was great, was this interview with Iranian-Jewish-Israeli comedian Noam Shuster-Eliassi, who talks about growing up in a small Israeli village nicknamed "The Oasis of Peace", where Israelis and Palestinians intentionally lived together. She's now got a documentary called "Coexistence My Ass". 
  • Equator also continues to bring gorgeous, heartbreaking writing and news, and I'm pretty sure I will subscribe once I sort out other subscriptions and bills for 2025. It is one of the few publications where I actually want to read everything. Some articles that stand out: How Gaza Broke the Art World - from the former editor of ArtForum and how he got fired for speaking up on Gaza, The Demand for Silence - on the unspoken and increasing costs of the Ukrainian war on Ukrainians themselves, Caste and Chappals - a translation of a memoir about being Dalit and what having shoes means, We Have Talked Enough About Ourselves - How the marriage of American exceptionalism and liberal Zionism led to genocide. 
  • Apparently the boycott against PenAmerica has been lifted. 

Tags:
toastykitten: (Default)
Zohran Mamdani on meeting Mustapha, the student who was falsely accused of being the Brown University shooter: I told Mustapha that we would love to have him back in New York City, where — as Mayor — I will make it my job to cherish, protect, and celebrate all New Yorkers and combat Islamophobia and anti-Palestinian racism at every corner.

I think this is the first time I’ve seen any American politician even say the words anti-Palestinian racism. 
toastykitten: (Default)
My main impression is that book Victor is a selfish and self-obsessed idiot. 

The "creature" or "monster" in the book is much more villainous than the movie one once he attains consciousness and understands morality and feeling. 

In the whole "this was definitely written by a teenager" vein...our protagonists act pretty impulsively the majority of the time. 

I'd be interested to read the Annotated Frankenstein from the Harvard University Press. 

toastykitten: (Default)
Our friend Greg Dunn is having his annual of his "imperfect" prints - 40% off for slightly imperfect prints is a great deal for his gorgeous artwork. I would buy...but I'm trying not to buy more stuff I don't have wall space for. '

He's also got a set of smaller art prints that are very pretty. 
Tags:
toastykitten: (Default)
These are the places I've given to this year:

On another note, this week is Read Palestine Week, and they've made 20 books available for free download

Nov. 25th, 2025 09:37 am

Eddington

toastykitten: (Default)
Well-acted, beautiful. A lot going on, like throwing spaghetti at the wall. I hated it. Pedro Pascal is barely in it. 

This review (spoilers) gets at why - nihilistic and the racial politics that it’s supposedly satirizing are based on the premise that all these political beliefs aren’t based on anything real other than selfishness. 
Tags:
Page generated Feb. 20th, 2026 06:22 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios