One of my favorite local coffeeshops posted to Instagram today a call for people to empty out their retirement accounts-- yes, the tax-deferred kind-- citing the AI bubble, lack of ethical investment options, and widespread poverty that could be addressed with this money.

This feels like a sign of something. I don't know what exactly. But certainly not of a society that's functioning.

Python isn't my favorite language from a design perspective, but I've gotta say I'm grateful for the large standard library.

Because when I'm writing a stupid Python script to automate something, I don't want to implement something like random.sample! I'm already resenting whatever it is that's making me write more than a shell script, and if I've gotta write little utility functions like that myself you know that in my resentment, laziness, and haste I'm gonna make some sort of stupid mistake!

Thanks to the magic of complaining, I guess, I now _have_ gotten a reply. They're sending another ballot.

So... I guess we'll see what happens? If this one doesn't arrive successfully either, I guess I'll be doing the affidavit thing on much shorter notice.

I can't turn in (or fill out) my mail-in ballot, because it went missing / never arrived even though the ballot tracking system thinks it did. We've been having a lot of trouble with mail lately-- very often our building gets days' worth of mail for everyone, all at once, left in a pile on the lobby steps.

I emailed the address on the vote-by-mail website but haven't gotten a reply.

My partner Jordan has updated her fundraiser: https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-jordan-avoid-homelessness-again

She's still looking for work. A real promising lead evaporated recently, and, as you probably know, finding any job anywhere, for anyone, is really hard these days.

If you could help, or share this somewhere, please do?

[Every trans person I'm dating in Chicago is now out of work. Most of my close people are / are barely getting by on gig work. I know it's like this everywhere.]

LB: I never went to Grace Hopper, I only knew the event by reputation, but holy shit that is a bleak omen for the times.

I suppose you can find similar phenomena sometimes with, say, iconic action movies that are sorta early in their highly specific subgenre, like Terminator 2 or Aliens.

But it also feels at odds with how genre movie sequels in general are kinda disparaged, like they're always necessarily cheap cash grabs either for highly specific niche audiences or for undiscerning sheeple who will watch anything with a familiar name.

(Not that there aren't _plenty_ of bad sequels to point to, but still.)

October thought: it's wild in retrospect how far into adulthood I was before I learned that the specific details of stereotypical movie monster conceptions I'd grown up around were largely not from the movies people referenced but from their sequels.

Zombies get their taste for brains in Return of the Living Dead, the persistently resurrected and era-hopping Dracula of Castlevania is more a reference to the movie sequels, and AFAIK most of the iconic Frankenstein bits are from sequels as well.

Any of y'all have favorite articles re: the working conditions of the masses of contractors who "train" AI models?

I feel this is massively underdiscussed, leaving unchallenged the assumption that this is like teaching a young mind, when in fact it's the enclosure of labor under lossy compression.

(I have run into some real harrowing ones over the years, but of course I didn't save/bookmark them because I never think to do that with articles.)

As today is Undertale's 11th birthday, I'm thinking about just how good Toby Fox is at writing dialog concerning non-binary people that is evocative instead of awkward.

Like, consider Toriel and Asgore's use of "my child", how it sounds a kind of solemn that's appropriate for who they are as characters, these kind of mythic old parental/guardian figures, whether they're the rulers of the world of monsters in Undertale or just your character's parents in Deltarune.

Or Susie's use of "dumbass".

Every time I'm walking across the southern edge of the Loop I'm reminded that downtown Chicago essentially has a pagan temple to Ceres (in her American mercantile aspect).

(The "default rec if I don't know anything about you" is a tricky thing, because that doesn't mean it's my favorite book. Though it's quite good.

What it means is that a lot of my recs have things I know plenty of people don't like: secondary-world settings, events that require serious trigger warnings, weird sex stuff, copious footnotes, plot that is advanced primarily through meetings and subtext, or second-person perspectives.

Whereas The Golem and the Jinni feels possibly good for anyone.)

The third of Helene Wecker's Golem-and-Jinni books is coming out in a few weeks, and I only found out by accident?? https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-gates-of-midnight-helene-wecker?variant=44717711753250

I swear, if you don't follow an author or their friends on social media you get like no advance warning about forthcoming books. I guess this is perhaps related to various book review columns getting constantly cut?

Anyway, the first book of the series is my default book recommendation if I don't know anything about you, so I'm very excited to get a third!

The larger scale version is of course that it's 2026 and we still don't have an easy answer for "I want a full-featured Linux-or-similar experience that doesn't depend on LLM-infected projects".

After years of intense free software types making heroic stands against non-free drivers and codecs I really would've expected something by now?

(I know the problem has gotten real hard given the number of infected projects; that's part of what I'm complaining about!)

Holy crap, official Terranigma rerelease for modern systems next year?? https://www.rpgsite.net/news/21176-terranigma-coming-to-ps5-ps4-switch-2-switch-xbox-pc-in-early-2027

I genuinely never once would have expected this one. And as much as I loved Illusion of Gaia I never quite broke through my mental block around playing games on an emulator (on a computer I use for general Internet stuff) to play the old ROM of this. So the prospect of playing it on the Switch is very exciting for me.

Any Chicagoans have recommendations for parks (or similar free-to-access pleasant public spaces) that one can drive to, park near, and walk around in without ever getting too far from somewhere to sit?

Asking for someone with mobility issues who could do with more places to walk out in the world but needs to be able to stop when their body says to stop.

Today's professional achievement: enlightened my co-workers as to how muppet-y baby albatrosses look.

A brutally anti-AI article written from a corporate competency perspective-- which, while I personally prefer naming this as an anti-labor enclosure technology (and I don't love that it uses "crazy", etc. pejoratively), might be good for sharing around to co-workers and such: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/

By the "I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again" guy, if you remember that one from 2024.

Before it let me talk to a human who could unfreeze my card, my bank's phone robot twice tried to trick me into terminating the call by accepting a link to download the bank's app (which of course I already have) by suggesting that I say, of all things, "proceed".

I'm not saying the people responsible for this design should necessarily be defeated through violence. But I do wish they'd close their eyes and think about what they've done.

Chicagoans and others: the Illinois Department of Transportation's annual survey is due tomorrow, and while it's a bit long and I'd quibble with its methodology some, this is a great opportunity to share that we have more than enough highways and could use better transit and cycling infrastructure: https://go.uis.edu/Traveler2026