Why is the bar 2 blocks from my house physically rickrolling me with their sound system at 10:30am?

Semiotically and socially fascinating that I felt like I had to dress up for my Botox appointment.

Self-examination nothing: y'all need to confront the fact that you owe your academic career to the unique expertise of librarians and archivists. Who do you think organized those LIBRARIES of texts that you're drawing upon?

THE SOLSTICE OCCURRED @ 20251221 10:03 AM UR ASTRONOMICAL WINTER HAS JUST BEGUN THO UR METEOROLOGICAL WINTER BEGAN 12/1 BUT UR DAYS WILL NOW BEGIN 2 GET LONGER CONGRATS U MADE IT

insistently pronouncing "in lieu" as "in leff" and muttering darkly about americans when nobody knows what the hell i'm talking about

does "lieutenant" just mean "placeholder"?

Double the candles at my sister's house for Chrismukkah cookie decorating. Happy solstice!

A banner day for wee beastie language, because they said “I love you!” and I said ”I love you!” and then they said “bye!” So uh. I guess they have some context-specific ideas about when you say that whoops.

Santas swimming through the sky

Wee beastie: <leads me over to the couch, and pushes me onto a seat> Me: What am I doing here? Spouse: It’s so they can jump on you Wee beastie: <grins, then jumps on me> Me: You know, I don’t like that Wee beastie: Yesssssss Me: And you don’t care Wee beastie, in the tiniest cutest voice: no care!

Just realized that the wee beastie’s been saying their own name for like, the last year, and I only just now REALIZED what it was they were saying. Anyway, wow, my kid’s amazing, to have put up with us not understanding them for THIS LONG.

The other day I was flopped on the bed with one of my cats next to me. Somehow she was both purring AND had an upset tummy, so I was just. Listening to noises happening at two different ends of the cat, feeling vaguely disturbed.

Extremely pleasant to have the solstice tomorrow morning and the last night of Chanukah in the evening like. Fuck. We made it. Let's light stuff on fire.

So this house belongs to someone who's leaving in search of their people? Because Ann Arbor is full of absurd excess but not usually this flavor.

It's your birthday, Duane.

It's like a checklist of things I believe

sixth night + shabbos

There's also the disconcerting fascist obsession with teen fertility as part of their bigger birth rate/anti-abortion/reproductive control obsession. Preventing transition is another way of manipulating vulnerable kids, denying them agency, and controlling reproduction just like abortion bans.

If you care about abortion rights, you should care about trans kids too. If you care about immigration, you should care about trans kids too. It's all the same fight.

me today

Enjoying the new-to-me noun that is クソさ (shittiness).

❤️ strippers ❤️

Freedom means letting people fuck up. That's just life. You can't save people from it. There's no life worth living without it.

A thread of how to say “nobody asked you” from around the world, starting with this one… A Lithuanian way of telling someone to mind their own business is ne tavo kiaulės, ne tavo pupos. It means “not your pigs, not your beans.”

Torn between crying about immediate cruelty to children, 1980s-revival nuclear war panic, and just dazed sleep deprivation so today's going great.

it’s not the tropes of stories but that the societal value of a “marketplace of ideas” comes with an implicit assumption that people are doing the abhorrent things because they haven’t had it explained to them, instead of because they value being abhorrent

MY 4-YEAR OLD: *calmly, while coloring a picture of the Grinch* If baby grinches die, we can eat them. If they’re clean. That’s ok

They're saying they need nuclear weapons for deterrence in an increasingly harsh security context. Japan. Needs nuclear weapons. Japan. Fuck.

Anonymous senior Japanese government official says Japan should possess nuclear weapons is 👀

But if my brain could stop screaming words excitedly at 3am that would be helpful for the entire rest of my life, like, if we could do that at 3pm instead, I'd appreciate it.

Somehow, I've accumulated 22,000+ words in this draft, and it's a bit inchoate, but it does appear to be cohering into a book somehow? Wild. I probably need to start drafting up an actual pitch for it.

oooooooooh we're halfway there (pretty sure I post this on the fourth night of Chanukah every year)

Maybe it's just because I have the world's most understanding spouse, but for what it's worth, having a kid has not been more of a challenge for my circadian rhythms than having a job. Anything other than wholly selfish solitude gets in the way of being amped on IDEAS in the middle of the night.

Erika stopped getting hopped up on writing at 1am just as you need to be winding down to sleep challenge 2026

Erika stop abusing italics challenge 2026

the wee beastie, encountering Pikachu for the first time, has pronounced it "bunny." And you know what, close enough.

There are learnings in here!

Night 1.

The wee beastie just slammed their hand on the piano app on my iPad, looked at me, and said MEOW. Feral baby raised by cats indeed.

One of the most semiotically astute things I've read about video games possibly ever.

The ongoing folk dialectological wrangling in re: how to pronounce Mario's name is one of the best recurring bits on The Besties and this is an amazing development.

Scott: 🎶All I wanna do, is see you turn into, a giant woman -- a giant wooooman🎶

Sometimes I wake up to homemade lemon bundt cake because I married a really awesome person

Shit I would be so good at this

HELL YES WE DO

One of my favorite nerdy lines, which I probably got from @levostregc.bsky.social : “I’m like Beowulf, impossible to date.”

"From each according to their ability, to each according to their need" doesn't have any caveats. What we deserve is defined by what we need, not by what we do.

So just FYI if you're baking bread in a pullman pan, make sure the loaf doesn't rise so enthusiastically that it rises into the mechanism of the lid itself

I have finally finished my list of 12 essays by Indigenous trans women in North America (plus some extra audio/video links). Please please please spend some time getting to know their work. Too often people use Indigenous trans women as a figure to weaponize rather than sit and think with them.