Pls Throw a Goat in the Volcano for my Head*

Work sent me new monitors and they are much nicer than the monitors I had before (Dell Ultrasharp 24” monitors to Lenovo 27” ThinkVision monitors) But setting them up includes re-wrangling the half a million cords that come with a PC set up because I cannot STAND a messy cord situation. And remember when I did this last time? I ended up with a concussion.

Also, WHAT. IS. TIME. Are you telling me, newsletter archive, that the last time I wrangled cords and smacked myself in the head and lost most of the words I wanted to use for months was an entire calendar YEAR AGO?

I Turned Fifty

In the same vein as WHAT. IS. TIME. I turned a half a century old this month (I mentioned this in my last post, I am now realizing). Turning forty was very hard in a surprising way (I always thought I’d age so gracefully and with a full bouquet of flipped birds** for anyone telling me I was doing it wrong, and then reality was very different). I expected fifty to feel hard in similar ways, but I’m pleased to report that the no-effs-to-give, full hag/crone, middle-age vibes I’ve been waiting for have finally arrived.

So that’s nice!

As part of my continued “Who the hell am I without Eric?” experiments, I agreed to a plan proposed sometime last year by Casey who thought I should fly to Seattle and stay with my sib from another crib***, Leoh & their partner Brandelyn, where everybody would crown me in sparkles and birthday banners and sing to me in public. (Terrifying.) I said okay, yes, but NO to the singing to me in public and made Valerie tag along for emotional support. Casey had to bail last minute and we missed her, but it was super fun! I wore my crown and sparkles for an entire drag brunch (also very fun) and did not die of a heat rash.

**I once saw a sticker with an illustration of a bouquet of flowers, only instead of flowers, it was a whole bunch of fists flipping the bird. I am very sorry indeed that I did not buy it because I cannot find anything similar; not a comic, not a TikTok, not a meme. But I say the phrase “full bouquet of flipped birds” often and it lands maybe 30% of the time, with the remaining 70% blinking at me confusedly. Why would anyone gather disembodied hands into a bouquet, I imagine they wonder.

UPDATE: WAIT. I found not a sticker, but a printable bit of art. Searching “bouquet of middle fingers” works, but “bouquet of flipped birds” does not. I will file this away for the nonplussed I regularly leave in my wake.

*Relatedly, only around 50% of people understand (without explanation) when I say “I’ll throw a goat in the volcano for you” in lieu of “thoughts and prayers.” I think my friend Kat coined the goat+volcano thing, but she also might insist that I did, so who even knows. Sometimes, if it’s an extra difficult problem I’m trying to solve (or hope you’ll be able to solve), I might say I’m tossing “a whole herd of goats” into the volcano, or say I’m sacrificing only the choicest “firstborn virgin goats.” This only seems to perplex the already bemused (or occasionally, outright offended) further.

Fake Pillows

At work, despite my ongoing efforts to rein in my crazy and cosplay as a serious and professional senior designer, I sometimes say weird things during our video calls. Thankfully, my colleagues are (mostly) used to me and (mostly) find me entertaining. They’ve started to make (hideous) AI graphics of cross stitched pillows of the words that sneak out of my mouth. This is embarrassing, funny, and enraging****.

****I could type out a novella of a rant about ChatGPT and Sam Altman in particular, but like many of you, I have to use AI for work (it’s very surreal, somewhat like digging one’s own grave!) and must find a way to cope. We are at least, moving toward Claude at work. Claude is still trained on stolen and uncompensated work and is still very much a huge ecological problem, but they at least said no to stripping safety guardrails for the Department of War. The bar is low, y’all.

***I’m so sorry to be asterisking out of order, but it’s just the hectic way this post happens to be flowing. Anyway, since Leoh is nonbinary/gender fluid, I was VERY proud of myself for coming up with “sib from another crib” as an alternative to the gendered “sister from another mister,” but alas, the phrase already exists. 😭 I’m not quite as disappointed as I was when I learned that I did not, in fact, coin the phrase, “Douche Canoe,” but it’s always a let down when I discover I am not as inventive as I like to think I am.

And now, books and movies and links!

📚 I hated It Ends with Us. I wasn’t planning on reading it and haven’t followed the law suit stuff over the movie at all, but in my goal to continue to cut ties with Amazon, I finally sorted out the Libby app with my teeny tiny local library (huzzah!) and this popped up as immediately available. I don’t understand why Booktok went so nuts for it. It’s awful? I feel so bad for the child at the end. Here’s my short/cranky review.

📚 The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennet was amazing and I highly recommend. I listened to it while trying to whip my yard into shape ahead of my youngest son hosting a bunch of kids here for a fancy prom dinner. I wanted to google all the characters and read their wikipedia pages after; they felt so real. Short & sweet review.

📚 The main character in The Dutch House, by Ann Patchett, is kind of the worst, but if you listen to the audiobook narrated by Tom Hanks, you might empathize with him. I did!

📚 A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich: Going in, I had no idea that this book won a Pulitzer, nor did I realize Ulrich was THE Ulrich who founded the feminist Mormon periodical, Exponent II. 😍 (She was also born in Idaho, y’all! Soda Springs, in fact, where you can scoop up naturally carbonated water from the ground, mix it with juice, and make your own pop. Seriously! We’ve done it.) If you like history, particularly an inside look into the oft-ignored side of women’s history, you should like this. I loved it.

📚 I thoroughly enjoyed The Cure for Women by Lydia Reeder. It does meander a bit, but I really enjoyed dipping in and out of the stories of women who fought for the right to attend medical school and work as respected doctors. Related sidebar: There’s a theory that the reason we can’t find any DNA proof of Joseph Smith’s (founder of Mormonism) polygamy is because he was friends with and utilized the services of Dr. John C. Bennet, an abortionist. Due to the instant pearl-clutching horror that a discussion about abortion causes most Latter-Day Saints, this is not a well-received theory. Interestingly, though! In The Cure for Women, I learned that abortion used to be a common practice and was even protected under English common law. Whether Smith did or didn’t use such services, I don’t know, but he certainly would have known about and had access to this method of hiding his plural marriage practices.

📚/📺 The Magicians by Lev Grossman & the TV series: I don’t know who to recommend this book or series to! I had feelings about the book, noted here in my (spoilery) Goodreads review. I am only half watching the TV series while I work, but I liked it better than the book until some things I thought the series fixed weren’t actually fixed. I keep watching because Olivia Taylor Dudley (plays Alice) makes me question my sexuality and I have a full crush on Hale Appleman’s character and the way he plays Elliot. Have you seen it or read it? Do you also have thoughts?

📺 My son Nate is home for the summer and picked Nightcrawler with Jake Gyllenhaal for movie night. It was so gripping! I was shocked to find out Gyllenhaal didn’t win an Oscar for this role. Both Nate and I had to remind ourselves several times that it was just a made up story, and that Gyllenhaal wasn’t really Lou, because he so completely embodies him, it’s amazing.

📺 Another Nate pick, we watched Catch Me if You Can, with Tom Hanks (doing a very uneven Chicagoan? Bostonian? accent) and Leonardo DiCaprio before he grew up all the way. I’d somehow never heard of this movie and it was delightfully interesting, even though I was bummed to find out the real-life guy it’s based on made most of it up. (Somehow, though, a petty thief finally striking it big with a falsified memoir that gets made into a major motion picture fits right in with the entire vibe he was going for).

🔗 I’m very sorry that the only purchase link I can find to my beloved skeleton Thoughts & Prayers patch is on eBay (linked above if you caught it). I have one sewn to my favorite cardigan (patching a hole, I am so thrifty - I’m wearing it in Seattle below!) and can’t remember where I bought it. I did find this enamel pin on etsy which includes both “Thoughts & Prayers” and middle fingers! So, very on brand for this post.

More links! All AI-Themed, I’m Sorry to Say:

🔗 Speaking of all the AI crap we’re trying to come to terms with (it’s clearly not going away), I liked this post by Jory Des Jardins (BlogHer founder) on LinkedIn. It feels like I’m dealing with this a lot at work. I find myself in conversations with leaders and decision makers who talk a lot about wanting to be on the forefront of AI and who want to make sure their companies are branded with AI all over them, but they can’t articulate WHAT they want the AI to do or HOW the AI is going to benefit their employees or their end users. 🫠 I just can’t see AI as an aesthetic without thinking about the liabilities.

🔗 This (LinkedIn again, I’m so sorry) post about the origin of the Claude AI name was fun since I’m not as mad at Claude as I am about some of the others.

🔗 And then, because the universe has a sense of humor: this roundup from Jason Kottke, just posted today, which includes a book about AI's effect on truth that contained quotes made up by AI. I cannot. I simply cannot. (He also links to a commencement speech getting booed for being pro-AI, which, honestly, fair.)

And finally, this bit of sad hilarity of an AI Output left in a textbook. It’s been so widely shared, I don’t know who the original source is.