I do not enjoy how the simplest functions of sites and apps are being stripped out and replaced with LLM features. I am being handed a miswired Lazy Gun every time I look for a flyswatter.

Once again, I am pondering the fact that the Tumblr algorithm thinks I am Jewish because I have liked and commented on posts about anti-semitism. 🤷🏻‍♀️ It is, as usual, depressing.

Watching a bunch of commentary tracks on movies (thank you, Blu-Ray golden age!) is weird because you end up with an urge to tell your friends “hey, your speaking voice sounds quite a bit like David Fincher’s” but also enough self-awareness to know that is an extremely weird, opaque, non sequitur comment you should keep to yourself. 🤔

In most cases, it would be clearer and more accurate to use terms like “rich” and “poor”. And not just slapping “pleb” on something might actually sharpen the writer’s thinking. Who do they actually mean? “Urban poor”? Does the generalization include slaves? Women? Freedmen (often successful business owners!)? Do they actually mean senators and their families? Citizens? Are they actually talking only about one period of the centuries of “Rome”?

(Grumble grumble, get off my portico, et cetera.)

I wish generalist historians and writers would stop using “plebeian” and “patrician” when talking about ancient Rome. I’m a non-scholar Rome nerd and I don’t have all the answers, but I DO know that the usage varied hugely over time: and that in much discussed eras, many actual plebeians were in high office and flush with wealth! By Cicero’s time it was like asking whether your ancestors were in the fashionable cabins on the Mayflower or rode steerage. (1/2)

#petPeeve

It is a little funny to look back at one’s life and realize moments one ALMOST became a birder before the moment it took. One’s “fizzle birds”, if you will!

#birding

I’d like to thank the state of California for providing a constant reminder that literally everything is slowly poisoning me.

Oh, the existential horror of the sound a young indoor cat makes when it sees a strange outdoor cat for the first time. No cat should be out there! Even my people should not be out there! The glass door is for ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY!

My headphones have “noise cancellation”; my phone can tell me this is a 2001 cover of terrible 1966 song “Somethin’ Stupid”; I feel like there’s an actual feature here longing to be born! Muzak cancellation WHEN, people?!

Looking up historical communist Eugene Victor Debs for the extremely normal reason that I couldn’t remember whether the X-Files lifted his first and middle names precisely for the creepy villain “Tooms” or reversed the order. (It’s the former.)

Kudos to the solicitor who flurry-knocked at my front door at the exact closing line of my audiobook of Haunting of Hill House. Great inadvertent spookiness, dude. (But also, read the sign.)

#amReading

I got the first news alert about the cruise ship hantavirus outbreak within minutes of discovering a bunch of fresh mouse poop in our garage. For several surreal seconds, I thought the Washington Post was reporting about an outbreak in my own house.

Humans can have second an ibuprofen. As a treat!

Imagine being a mouse and just effortlessly pooping perfectly consistent little cylindrical poops all day long, no matter what garbage you eat. We should all be so lucky.

Some day I’m going to figure out how to scientifically differentiate a Good Bad Movie from a Bad Bad Movie and when that happens, it’s over for these bad-bad action movies with ironic hipster Letterboxd scores above 3. 😡

Watched the dude bagging my groceries today like a hawk, on the slightly unfair basis that a man who can remark to his coworker in that illiberal way that he “doesn’t like genre books” might very well stow my little cups of yogurt under my canned goods, “assistant manager” tho’ he be. 😠

Science outreach program, trying to be accessible: what is the most common habitat within one football or soccer field length from the nest?

Me: 😶😶😶 Could you phrase that in a unit I understand? Say, in Diplodocus lengths? Never mind, I’ll just go look up those other things.

Big news! Did you know that juvenile hairy woodpeckers sometimes -- "infrequently" — have yellow crowns instead of red? Well, if a person stalking a woodpecker family were lucky enough to see one of these yellow-crowned babies, she'd be able to differentiate it from the red-crowned one and know there were at least two kids in the nest! 🥹

#BirdPhotography #wildForWoodpeckers #oregon #birding

TFW you buy a plant at a nursery and you’re like…you’re just handing me this living being for $24? Without a background check? What if I’m a serial plant-killer?!

Apple (I assume): people are swamped and stressed with notifications on their phones! Let’s let them tailor a robust variety of focus mode settings so they can reduce distractions and stress when they want to!

My phone, a million times: Do you want to automatically turn on the focus mode you made for birdwatching when you’re at your home? [Yes] [No but feel free to keep asking me forever]

#UserExperience