Catch my humble attempt to maintain some kind of public record of Skamania and Klickitat county meetings at SkamaniaDispatch.com 🫡

I don't know if she's on here, but Michelle Tsai's legendary pigeon sweater pattern was released on Ravelry today! Exciting times for knitters 🧶, bird enthusiasts 🦆, and Jeopardy fans ❕- aka 95% of Bluesky www.ravelry.com/patterns/lib...

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people local newspaper reporters are rarified elites instead of ink-stained wretches driving their Honda Civic to a crime scene so you know don’t have to rely on Nextdoor and the police press release.

Our DnD DM has just introduced us to a pared-down RPG “micro-system” called Roll For Shoes, and I’m enjoying it! Easier to pick up, less to keep track of in-game, less prep for our DM. Made for a fun trip to a fair to find a princess’s lost goose! rollforshoes.com

this is the Purge of online discourse. for the next 15.5 hours, all takes are legal

Reporter here. Most local / regional papers charge an initial 99 cents for a digital subscription. Try it for a year. Aim to be an engaged and informed member of the public. Democracy is counting on you.

I can't get over this number: in 2007, there were 360,000 newspaper jobs. Now, there are 80,000. "My local paper sucked!" Sure. What sucks even more? The void. "I get all my news from the Guardian!" No, the Guardian doesn't report on your town council, your school board, local cops.

Reading the book Billionaire Wilderness. About fell out of my chair when I found out how little the foundation of the Yellowstone Club, the billionaire club that owns a mountain in Teton county and whose ~900 member families have a combined net worth of ~$290B, gives away. Only about $2.5M in 2024.

Before snow or ice storms I always make a big pot of Japanese curry, then charge our battery packs and fill up our water storage. Has made for a cozy pre-storm routine.

What's more shocking than ICE's plan to cram as many 8,500 humans into massive, soul-crushing warehouses? Seeing the actual DHS floor plan that echoes slavery ships and history's worst gulags with no rec space but a gun range for guards My new column on the camps www.inquirer.com/opinion/ice-...

this is a really incredible (and important) read

A trifecta of stories about the decline in US tourism: @the-independent.com @forbes.com @nytimes.com www.nytimes.com/2026/02/20/t...

I had to laugh when I was meeting with a bunch of Internet freedom folks in Sweden and they were all confused that our US government doesn’t fund human rights digisec work. They not only don’t pay us, they wish we wouldn’t do it at all!

Hardly the point, but I’m still extremely irritated that our $500M hospital boat is almost never used to help Americans in ex: natural disaster zones. 4 times total in the history of Mercy & Comfort. Portable emergency healthcare for civilians is, to the Fed, only useful as a diplomatic lever.

Love how when you get into TTRPG games, your first character is always like, badass warlock with a dark backstory. Then every other character is like, a bespectacled weaver tradesfrog with a magical yarn shopping addiction.

If you suffer from Hidradenitis Suppurativa, there's promising new research out about a low-risk, over-the-counter intervention that offered participants pretty radical results: blue gel antiperspirant/deodorant. skin.dermsquared.com/skin/article...

And of course we have local republicans spinning all kinds of nonsense about how Trump’s tariffs are good for American industry. But they don’t show up for stuff like this real rubber-meets-the-road effort to bring manufacturing back to the US, because it’s using taxes to pay for education.

It’s now happened a few times that some other politically-active woman in my area has said something to the effect that they respected the abortion access work I do locally, but because they felt attacked by some bit of my housing or anti-surveillance activism they’re, “starting to rethink that.”

“In Chicago, of 92 people arrested for assaulting or impeding officers last fall, 74 cases have resulted in no charges; in 13 cases, charges were filed and dismissed; and 5 charged cases were still pending. As of the end of January, there have been no convictions” www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026...

I gotta say, if the state of the world has you feeling down in the dumps, spend an evening finding and going to something hyperlocal. Performance at the high school, community college lab open house, 4H youth competition, senior center art show. Go look at something a neighbor spent their time on.

Spent last night at the open house for the new Industrial Training Assessment Center at a nearby small town community college, secured with a DoE grant to both teach advanced manufacturing skills to Gorge students, and serve as a public center for local small businesses to get support on big ideas!

As this time has people revisiting their Holocaust education, IMO we focus on ghettos and death camps because that feels tangible to children. Families like mine, I would later learn, never made it to camps. With tens of thousands of other Slavic Jews, they were shot into ditches in forests.

“As Karen got to know the guards at the Northwest ICE Processing Center where she was held, she kept hearing the same thing from them: that ICE officers are paid a bonus every time they detain someone. “Individual ICE agents get money per head that they detain – the guards told me that,” Karen says.

The idea that anyone would want to take, and keep, photos of their abortion under criminalized circumstances would make a lot of privacy people's heads explode. But building tech that helps people access the right to know yourself is at the very heart of our values, why we do any of this.

The people who tell you it’s pointless to hope for a better future often don’t realize the opposite of hope isn’t doom, it’s acceptance. And part of the practice of acceptance is dealing with your grief, and realizing where you are right now is maybe less disastrous than you thought.

Milton Glaser, 1999

What's wild is Black people keep telling everyone else this but accepting that racial solidarity against mass incarceration is the baseline of meaningful resistance is a bridge too far for an overwhelming majority of the population, despite very obvious for-profit concentration camp plans.

I know this is hardly the point to many people but it should be: many cities are successfully pushing back on these detention center plans with existing local rules around water and sewer capacity, occupancy etc. None are built to handle ex: thousands of people’s toilet and other wastewater needs.

The govt has been trying (in spurts) to declassify UAP info for years. The biggest hurdles are that agencies refuse to comply with automatic declassification requirements and the National Archives can't declassify other agencies' records. If you want real declass, give NARA that authority.

New: A comedian set up a fake ICE tip line as a joke. Then 100 calls flooded in: neighbors ratting on neighbors, a teacher reporting a kindergartener. Fans say the viral TikToks revealed deportation's "banality of evil." Conservatives say he should be in prison wapo.st/4kM4qbF

And then I got to wrap up today leading a bunch of volunteers to try and pull public records for each of the DHS detention centers from local agencies so they can be available on MuckRock for activists, journalists, researchers. I really am so lucky this is my job.

Today at Noon PT I'll be excited to share the organizing tactics that are helping rural communities, typically underresourced for lawsuits or ballot measures, to push back on license plate reader surveillance. Looking forward to it!

Recalling a fascinating, if not circular, discussion I had with someone who could not understand why it's not a good argument for veganism that, "animals eat more in calories than you get from them." Be vegan if you like, but that is true of plants too. No life form is metabolically efficient.

One day I will have my dream of a totally offline (and so hopefully private, please 🥲) personal cargo bot that trails me around with a proximity beacon like a little pack mule carrying my groceries. Then it will truly be the future.

Mom, people here are still defining their activism by what they do or don't consume. Come pick me up!

You may be tempted to roll your eyes and say that this was obvious, but there is a substantive difference between pointing out there is a slippery slope and having solid evidence that Ring's CEO is planning to expand Search Party beyond lost pets. Kudos to 404 Media.

The multi-jurisdictional nightmare that is trying to build renewable energy, particularly transmission, is exemplified in this story. Even when the right siting and partnerships can be worked out, the circular mess of bureaucratic dependencies remains: www.hcn.org/articles/the...

My formerly feral cat, who cannot really be picked up or held, managed to make it all the way through her vet visit with 1ml gabapentin and the vet techs absolutely loading her with churu. Like a proper party girl, she managed to make it all the way home before puking all over herself.

I too am excited about renewable energy, but America is going to have to do something about the “curmudgeon’s veto” and how it’s made esp transmission construction into a clusterquack. We are literally never going to reach decarbonization goals if people always scream “put it somewhere else!”

I hear the left needs a technology to get excited about. May I suggest Magnetic Resonance Imaging:

Technology is a form of human cognition and expression. As such it holds no inherent moral value. People do both great and horrendous things with their capacity to think and speak, and how that shows up with tech is no different.

this is one of those things that everyone knew and assumed to be true, but it's good to have the hard evidence. Ring CEO Jamie Siminoff also emailed staff after Charlie Kirk murder to suggest another new Ring feature could have been used to help catch his killer. Both emails in article

Scoop: Ring's CEO told staff Search Party is not going to be just for dogs, according to a leaked email I obtained. Said it is "first for finding dogs" before suggesting it would be expanded to be used for crime: www.404media.co/leaked-email...

Just as many people’s kind of half-baked takes on labor come from never having a wage service or retail job, a lot of takes on technology automation are clearly informed by never having an administrative job in their life. Go buy your office manager a coffee and repent.

Ready to send out a stack of postcards advertising my free public meetings newsletter to my small town neighbors. Count down to when someone says in an accusatory manner, as they always do, “Who is paying for this???” It is I, the shadowy benefactor of $50 of printing and $100 of postage.

Increasing the concentration of carved horn hair forks and sticks around my house so when I inevitably lose them, I’ll run into another one discarded on a counter or table or in my bed in short order.

it's hard to see someone else live your dream

what is the best candy and why is it gummy nerds clusters