In fall of 1997, my freshman year of undergrad, I spent HOURS in the computer lab building my own web site, armed only with gumption and a rudimentary grasp of HTML. The longer you spent on the early Web, the more potential you started to see. It is the exact opposite for AI.

let’s look at some flowers from before my rain gauge was at 4” for the week

Charlie Brown’s unity and harmony hoes

"So it may come as a surprise, especially to younger Americans, to learn that DHS was originally conceived in the interest of unity & harmony – & that the phrase 'homeland security' was originally meant to be reassuring." NO. Activists & privacy experts sounded the alarm at DHS' inception.

“Bubble” is just the word you use to say “community” when you don’t like the people in the community.

I don’t remember a soul on LiveJournal lamenting it being a bubble” because of course it was. A bubble in a bubble. Posting-online anywhere is still sicko behavior that itself sometimes produces material that breaks containment and enters into conventional media. (And that’s fine.)

any media made under conditions of white supremacist patriarchy is going to (I know) be shaped by said conditions, of course including porn, no I am not writing an essay (again)

Maybe I’m going against the grain here but I think the contemporary trend towards Puritanism is pretty bad for society and pretty clearly worse than porn is

porn is just people, I don’t think it’s very complicated

I rarely put on tv during these things but it’s something seeing like half the various law enforcement agency guys wandering in and out of live shots still in their tactical chud wear (neck gaiter, etc)

maybe it’s always happening

Many trans Kansans whose licenses were cancelled by a recent state law now face a kind of poll tax: To vote, they’ll have to pay $16 for a replacement license with a gender marker that doesn’t match their identity.

“…a moral appeal to fecund motherhood that whitewashes punitive anti-female, anti-family sentiment and policy as wholesome Americana. It looks like a mother with a gun, happy to use it to defend her kids. It’s a freedom not extended to mothers of Black kids carrying skittles, and that’s key.”

I really like these types of efforts. This is trench warfare and we can do things at the hyper-local level to throw sand in the gears. www.amny.com/new-york/ice...

Entomologically incorrect pollination fantasy in honour of spring: Pierre Amédée Varin in 1852 imagining a vanilla flower receiving "a farewell kiss from her fiancé." (I think a kind of bee pollinates vanilla, not a butterfly.) A plate from _Papillons--Metamorphoses terrestres des peuples de l'air_.

“On May 23, 1796, a newspaper ad was placed seeking the return of Ona ‘Oney’ Judge, an enslaved Black woman who had ‘absconded from the household of the President of the United States,” George Washington.”

Laws aren’t real, 404 Error edition:

if I haven’t killed off Anthony Comstock by the end of this holiday weekend (in writing)

ladies and gentlemen the weekend

some real smoked too much weed and got really into mary daly freshman dorm behavior

Nothing is inevitable

"The move came after a transgender student who was part of Boise High School’s Sexuality and Gender Alliance died by suicide, and another stopped attending the school, the group’s lawyers wrote in a legal agreement reached Wednesday requesting the case be dismissed."

this whole series, just such a precise slice of how things are now and how we got here:

planted my common milkweed 💕🌱🦋

We are going to savor this one. Our client, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, is freed of these outrageous, vindictive charges. It’s a good day.

after years of reading for this book—hanging out in histories rarely told together—it is even MORE wild to me that there was a moment in the last decade in which some feminists were completely confused that feminism could exist outside capitalism

today in "if only!" conservative fantasies: "Socialism, feminism, and suffragism, the terrible triplets, connected by the same umbilical cord, and fed from the same nursing bottle" tile.loc.gov/storage-serv...

Melissa hits the Texas angle on the head. It is also important to note that when Trump became president, some number of people from the Texas AG's office went on to work in the national AG's office to undertake the exact same playbook:

also a new must-watch @katelynburns.com video all on that guy, Judge Reed O'Connor

the Trump admin has already bullied some hospitals into ending gender-affirming care for minors, even in states where there's no ban on the books. and they are not content to stop there: now they want patients' records and providers' files and are turning to one federal judge to get them. my story:

do you need to see Andrew Eldritch in a white suit? "happy" world goth day etc

It can be hard to keep track of all the anti-trans litigation, but, just like the anti-abortion movement, it relies on violating local sovereignty through federal courts. By @melissagiragrant.com newrepublic.com/article/2108...

I wrote about this exact kind of guy and the erotics of MAGA for @lukeoneil47.bsky.social's Welcome to Hell World a while back

@jesspish.bsky.social nooooooo

(yes, Bluesky is getting the anachronisms I can't get out of my head while I am writing about the fucking 1870s, again)

today I'm certain that if he could have Anthony Comstock would have been a podcaster

keeping a kind of garden diary here:

Extraordinary levels of back

Court transcripts are in from today's closed-door hearing in front of Judge April Perry on the Broadview Six case. Perry discusses the case's grand jury transcripts. She doesn't sound happy. "I have never seen the types of prosecutorial behavior before a grand jury that I saw in those transcripts."

a vibe: vintage martha among her pots

is there going to be a series of those j g wentworth ads for the "weaponization" fund

the further drift from "jan 6 was an op" to "jan 6 was just some trespassing, maybe" to "jan 6 was political persecution of MAGA" and back to "but did Jan 6 even happen?" again (now with cash payments)

Chicago’s top federal prosecutor Thursday dropped the case against the remaining “Broadview Six” defendants in a stunning hearing that revealed apparent misconduct before a grand jury — of which he said he recently learned. Quick take via @chicago.suntimes.com: chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...

this interview with @ariberman.bsky.social got very real (as in, authoritative and terrifying) about the future of elections after Callais and how the regime doesn’t even need to do a January 6 again

the bullshit "out trans students or lose federal funding" bill that passed the House yesterday with eight Democrats voting Yes? it also bars schools from using federal funding “to teach or advance concepts related to gender ideology"

good morning "Grown Ups" is Lower Key "Razzmatazz"

not ready to go see what the storm did (or did not do) to the garden

Psychosexual breakdown happening at the Tucker Carlson merch store

The government is going to lose the Broadview Six case. They’ve already dropped felony charges and they’re only taking misdemeanors to trial to save face. But it’s come at a tremendous personal cost to people who never should have been defendants at all. www.chicagotribune.com/2026/05/21/b...

White Night Riots on this day in 1979, roll tape (briefly featuring Jane Fonda):