In May I took a great trip with friends through Oregon and we ended in California. The timing for the trip, however, was to coincide with the memorial service for my oldest friend's mother.
As she is my oldest friend, I knew her parents the best of all my friends' parents because of the stretch of time over which we saw one another (and she lived just a few doors down from me). I was not close to them but they were always kind to me, and it's interesting how it's the kindness that lingers. ( Read more... )
This is the plaque that marks where the tollhouse once stood on the Wribbenhall (eastern) end of Bewdley Bridge. It was designed by Thomas Telford, as was the bridge itself, and built in the last years of the 18th century. Modernisation works in 1960 saw it demolished, despite a fairly energetic campaign by Bewdley Civic Society; the society put up this plaque and shaped paving in 2002. The only decent photo I can find of the tollhouse before its demolition is on this Facebook page, which should be visible without an account. (I haven't got one, after all!)
In January one must play Weather Roulette, with the usual disappointment when weather doesn't do what the forecast says it will, and equally when it does. Thought of getting a massage today but probs said snow so didn't book. There was no snow and sidewalks were still dry, but forecast said rain and snow all week, so I went up to Loblaws for everything I forgot to get on the weekend. And still forgot the Voltaren my doctor recommends for cysts because I'm running short. I must put everything into my phone or I will never remember what I need.
Because my downstairs stays cold unless the thermostat is bumped up to 21C/ 70F and because I am of a saving disposition when it comes to gas usage, I wear a jacket or a shawl when couch potatoing. But my indoor jacket doesn't zip anymore and the shawl keeps shifting about. So I pulled out a high end Polo hoodie my bro gave me yonks ago. I'm pretty sure it's the real deal because it has various features I've never encountered elsewhere, like velcro tabs where not needed. It's bright red and therefore goes with nothing else in my rose-pink and purple wardrobe, and of course at an early stage I got bleach on the sleeve. Consequently I don't wear it outside. But it works marvellously indoors and, as I discovered, under my winter coat when outside. Blow away, winds. I am now triple layered, and I have a hood that I'm not afraid to use. Bonus is that I can wear it with the red scarf that A. gave me years back, because I can't wear any of my neck warmers and cowls with it either. My other hoodies are ragbag ancient and only used as nightwear. I was debating getting a respectable hoodie for spring and autumn wear, but not buying cheap fashion from the dollar store is doubtless a virtue.
The extra legs for my bed arrived late this afternoon. I have ascertained that they are the right length (not too long) and that they should be easy enough to fit, but I won't do it until tomorrow because I don't feel like dismantling my nicely made bed this evening.
We had a tiny amount of snow last night - just enough to lightly cover the roads and yards, but little enough that it was almost all gone by the middle of the day today. Then by the afternoon the temperature was about 5C/40F and there went the rest of it.
Funny story about Aria: she is far from a fluent reader yet, but this afternoon she was reading on the school bus and didn't realise the bus was at her stop until the driver called out to her. (My daughter picked up the other two from school because they were carrying their musical instruments, and they normally walk home on Mondays if they are not burdened with instruments.)
Amid awful days of murder and bloodlust, the news broke last week that Twitter has a massive AI-generated child porn problem. But what drove me to distraction, strangely, was not primarily horror of the child porn itself. It was the point-blank refusal of the media and political classes to give Twitter up, delivered in contradictory, murky, and often false statements made by way of excusing themselves.
The worst excuse for not leaving Twitter (we are not going to bother to call it X) is a crude and poorly-reasoned argument for “free speech.” After Epstein, ample (and growing) evidence demonstrates that a lot of powerful people think of the sexual exploitation of children as a jape, a joke, a little secret handshake kept from the masses to signal to one another that each is like the other but not like us. It’s their free speech. To the extent that the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, 8chan turns out to have been taking its cues from the powerful all along.
What drew my eye the most, though, was the slew of official lies about the sentience of Grok, Elon Musk’s AI child porn engine. “Musk’s AI chatbot Grok apologizes,” read a headline at The Hill, despite the fact that Grok, which is not sentient (noting here that autocorrect prompted me to refer to Grok as “who” rather than “which”), can’t affirmatively do anything. When that didn’t provide a salve for their consciences, politicians, such as Irish Minister for Media Patrick O’Donovan, stated that the people who make child porn with Grok are the ones who should be held responsible, rather than Twitter. After that percolated a bit in unsatisfactory fashion, Musk’s team announced that Grok’s child-porn-generating capabilities would go behind a paywall. As if that were a good, or even a bad, solution to the problem. Finally the paywall, too, was revealed as a fraud; it turned out that Grok is not really paywalled at all.
The Hill is not Vox is not The Guardian is not an Irish politician, obviously, and each has its own imperatives and stakes in a story like this one. But as the child porn and deepfakes and bikini pictures of the recently murdered Renee Good kept flowing, what emerged above all was a picture of crippling addiction. When it was a convenient excuse for staying on Twitter, Grok was sentient; when that excuse failed, it was sentient no longer. When the “people, not machines, are bad” excuse stopped working, the paywall became the excuse to stay; it’s worth noting too that most outlets just regurgitated the paywall reporting, with absolutely zero interrogation of the utility or otherwise of a paywall on child porn—with links to their various regurgitations all posted, as ever, on Twitter.
The connective tissue here is simply that the people who run the world cannot, will not, get off Twitter.
Even if AI is now in everything, foisted upon us by people actively planning our mass murder, it is, at base, an internet technology, operating on the tech sector’s logic. You log into your LLM drug of choice, type a prompt, and it spits out drivel. But it’s all still designed to get you hooked, and we are all hooked. One more swipe, one more prompt, one more scroll, one more check for one more retweet. Don’t want to talk to someone in person, especially if they’re your constituents or readers? Make your pronouncements on social media.
Except it’s 2026, so maybe now you talk to a chatbot, because even the image of a person on Twitter is too much to bear. Sure, all this may help you on your way to some version of psychosis, and there is a slight chance you could die by suicide, or murder someone, but in exchange it will spare you the cost of real reflection. Maybe by 2030, when even AI is too much, the destruction of yourself or others will escalate; you might choose it anyway, so long as it feels like you’re communicating while avoiding the cold, hard fact that communicating means sitting with yourself as much as it does with someone else.
There’s no engagement on Twitter. Get rid of that excuse. If you’re on the left or center, nobody on Twitter comes to your work through that app. If you’re on the right, you’re driven to post at ever higher registers, lest you get pinned down as the wrong sort of right, until you’re posting child porn prompts. If you’re still on Twitter, you’re a mark and an asshole who evidently approves of child porn, that is, who doesn’t disapprove of it enough to exit the child porn factory.
Leave Twitter. Most of us are old enough to have left once-beloved online spaces again and again. I myself joined and left Twitter, LiveJournal, Mastodon, and at least six forums when they went bad. Just leave. None of this lasts forever. And wasn’t the only good promise of the internet—the only promise it kept, and that (still) flies in the face of power’s insistence on surveilling us at all times—that you could just pick up, reinvent yourself, be someone else?
There’s something dark, primordial, destructive about the online addiction that is driving so many of us to madness. All my priors have started to crumble a little; all I learned in life and school is a little bit correct, still, but not enough to satisfy me. I could (and have) spit out a Marxist analysis, a feminist one, a Freudian one, or some combination, and it wouldn’t capture the fullness of what’s happening. Something has broken in me because I see that all of it—AI, our collective addiction to this thing we call “the internet,” the economy, the child porn, oafs murdering people in the streets—is connected but I lack the language, the smarts, to articulate the connection, to make it coherent. I’m only making a start, like many others, and together we may find the language in time.
If we make it, of course. Older people seem more scared of this moment than they were during the Cold War, during the upheavals of the ’60s, during the many crises of the ’70s. The world feels poised on the precipice, about to topple over. We made it 100 years with the Bomb without annihilating the planet but it feels as though we may only make it through 15 years of Web 2.0.
Male Fantasies by Klaus Theweleit (1977)
Not for nothing, I finally decided to read Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies this week. Written in 1977 and long regarded as one of the most important studies of fascism, it’s been on my to-do list for years, but it wasn’t germane to my immediate work. So I just didn’t, but then Grok’s child porn and Minneapolis happened, and it seemed to be time.
Male Fantasies is a tough read, not because it’s difficult, but because it isn’t. Theweleit offers us a matter-of-fact, direct, clipped analysis of Freikorps literature from interwar Germany. The ugliness and hatred is in plain language, in each diary entry and shitty novel. And it’s also immediately recognizable. It’s here, now, 2026, probably always, but definitely now.
The introduction of this edition, written by the great, much missed Marxist feminist, Barbara Ehrenreich, prepares the reader:
As a theory of fascism, Male Fantasies sets forth the jarring—and ultimately horrifying—proposition that the fascist is not doing “something else,” but doing what he wants to do. [...] When he penetrates a female adversary with a bullet or bayonet, he is not dreaming of rape. What he wants is what he gets, and that is what the Freikorpsmen describe over and over as a “bloody mass”: heads with their faces blown off, bodies soaked red in their own blood, rivers clogged with bodies. The reader’s impulse is to engage in a kind of mental flight—that is, to “read” the murders as a story about something else, for example, sex ... or the Oedipal triangle ... or anything to help the mind drift off. But Theweleit insists that we see and not “read” the violence.
She goes on to talk about history, the dark thought that eats at me now, the thing I don’t want to think is true:
Reinforced by Marxism and later feminism, we have rejected the conventional history of “kings and battles” for the “hidden history” of everyday life, almost to the point of forgetting how much of everyday life has, century after century, been shaped by battles and dominated by kings or warrior elites: [...] the illiterate Greek chieftains on their decade-long excursion to the plains of Asia Minor; the tribal bands of Northern Europeans who raided Rome and then its Christian outposts; the Asiatic “hordes” who swept through medieval Europe; the Crusaders who looted the Arab world; the elite officership of European imperialism; and so on. These were men—not counting their conscripts and captives—who lived only parasitically in relation to the production of useful things, who lived for perpetual war, the production of death.
We are, perhaps only aspirationally but still meaningfully, little Agamemnons underneath the thin cloth of civilization we all wear. Recognizable but not. Primeval. Destructive without direction for any number of reasons, because someone didn’t hug us when we needed it, didn’t fuck us when we asked, didn’t give us that raise, didn’t flinch when we charged them. Took Briseis from us. It’s every old story come alive, vibrating with the awful possibility that we are nothing more than what we’ve been. Unheimlich.
Thank you to everyone who has played HYDRANYM with us over the last few months. We are at work on a new Flaming Hydra word game, coming soon!
PLAY the absurd word game just for Flaming Hydra subscribers one last time. Check out the rules here. It is fun.
This week the theme is: CHEMISTRY
On Friday come back and see the best 21 entries, as judged by a panel of Flaming Hydra editors. You may vote for your FAVORITE(S) at that time. Winners will be announced on Monday.
Victors will thrill to be immortalized, with their winning entry, on the ANNALS of HYDRANYM page.
Our first issue, New Frontiers in Combustion, will post in the spring, and we are having a lot of fun making it. Quantities will be limited, so act now!
Our solar system has eight major planets, nine if you believe that Pluto Was Wronged. It also has literally thousands of minor planets, which are also colloquially known as asteroids, many of which reside in the “asteroid belt” between Jupiter and Mars. I learned some time ago that the International Astronomical Union, through its Working Group on Small Bodies Nomenclature, will give some of these minor planets, usually designated by number, an actual name. What kinds of names? Sometimes of geographical locations, sometimes of observatories, sometimes of fictional characters like Spock or Sherlock Holmes, sometimes of scientists (or their family members), and sometimes, just sometimes, they’re named after science fiction authors.
This little space potato is a Main Belt Asteroid whose orbit is comfortably between Jupiter and Mars, has a diameter of about 10.7 kilometers, and has a “year” of about 5 years, 8 months and 10 days. If I start the clock on a ScalziYear today, it’ll be New ScalziYear’s Day on September 22, 2031. Plan ahead! If you want to look for Johnscalzi, the link above will tell you where it is, more or less, on any given day, but at 10km across and an absolute magnitude of 12.19 (i.e., really really really dim), don’t expect to find it in your binoculars or home telescope. Just know that it there, cruising along in space, doing its little space potato-y thing.
How do I feel about this? My dudes, dudettes and dudeites, I am so unbelievably stoked about this I can’t even tell you. It’s not an exaggeration to say this was something of a life goal, but not a goal that was in my control in any significant way. I suppose it might be possible to buy one’s way into having an asteroid named for you, but I don’t know how to do that, and I wouldn’t even if I did. How much cooler to be tapped on the shoulder by the International Astronomical Union, and to be told, here is a space potato with your name. I can die happier now than I could have a day ago. To be clear, I don’t plan to die anytime soon. But when I do, if they’re shooting remains into space that point, now they will have a place to aim me at.
The links below go directly to the organizations’ websites. Over the next week, we will be posting detailed profiles of each organization over on Tumblr.
A4TE was formed when The National Center for Trans Equality merged with the Transgender Legal Defense and Education Fund (a longtime FTH supported org!) Their mission is to fight for the legal and political rights of transgender people in America. ~
Sued by Elon Musk (who lost!) CCDH protects human rights and civil liberties online by holding social media companies responsible for business practices that spread hate and disinformation. ~
Disability Law United (formerly The Civil Rights Education and Enforcement Center) is a nonprofit legal organization that fights for liberation and equity through the lens of intersectional disability justice. ~
The Environmental Integrity Project investigates environmental problems and fights for average people facing David-vs-Goliath odds against well-connected energy companies and other polluters. ~
The Freedom to Read Foundation was established to promote and defend the Constitutional right of individuals to express their ideas without governmental interference, and to read and listen to the ideas of others; to foster libraries as institutions wherein every individual’s First Amendment freedoms are fulfilled; and to support the right of libraries to include in their collections and make available any work which they may legally acquire. ~
GSK, run by Gazans, has spent the past year and a half providing hot, nourishing meals to people in Gaza, feeding 3,000 people a day across ten kitchen sites. ~
GPAHE believes that to protect and advance human rights, particularly those of marginalized and underrepresented communities, build inclusive democracies, and solve global challenges, we must expose and counter the far-right actors and movements that undermine those values. ~
An environmental org and civic action org rolled into one, GA helps local people organize effectively in order to get clean energy projects built in their communities. ~
A national-state partnership focused on lifting up the voices of Black women leaders at the national and regional levels in our fight to secure Reproductive Justice for all women, girls, and gender-expansive individuals, NBWRJA delivers proactive advocacy and policy solutions to address issues at the intersections of race, gender, class, sexual orientation and gender identity. ~
A Jewish-led mobilization against the persecution, detention, and deportation of immigrants in the United States, NAA takes on campaigns against detention centers and ICE training programs, and organizes mutual aid and deportation defense. ~
VB embeds journalists in nonprofit newsrooms around the US to cover important local elections. It aims both to educate voters about municipal and state level issues and to revitalize reporting at a local level. ~
Umbrella: Anti-Poverty Direct Aid groups
For the past six years, FTH has supported one “umbrella” cause: we invite participants to donate to their own local grassroots organization, while also suggesting a handful of exemplary organizations working in communities where the need is especially acute. This year, our umbrella category is organizations providing direct aid to community members, including food, housing assistance, and other basic needs. When looking for an org to support, we encourage you to think about specific populations in your community who may be especially at risk.
Echo Food Bank ** - Food bank situated among several Native nations in New Mexico. They also offer an affordable preschool program.
Peninsula Poverty Response * - Providing communities around Ocean Park WA with food assistance, clothing, laundry services, transportation assistance, and showers, offering immediate relief and a pathway to stability with dignity and compassion.
Sisters PGH * - A Black Trans-led organization, Sisters PGH offers both basic resources and counseling to trans people in the Pittsburgh area, including safe, stable housing for Brown and Black trans folks.
Women’s Daytime Drop-In Center * - Oakland, CA based org providing resources, meals, and a place to go for unhoused women and children.
…or a similar organization working in your community!
++
Organizations marked with an asterisk (*) allow for international donations directly through their websites; two asterisks (**) indicate limited international donations. The orgs without asterisks may take international donations through a paypal or venmo account. If you are a non-US-based bidder/donor and you are having trouble finding an organization to which you can donate, please email us directly at fandomtrumpshate @ gmail . com.
Below you'll find the calendar for the tenth (!) FTH auction. (What is FTH?)
Our list of supported organizations for 2026 is here. Over the next week, we'll be posting more in-depth profiles of each of these organizations on Tumblr to help creators and bidders can make thoughtful, informed decisions. You can also look at the Auction FAQ (which has lots of useful information for people thinking about signing up as creators, as well as dedicated sections on bidding and on nonprofit orgs.) If you’re raring to go, you can also look at our bidding policies. You'll also find the dates for our 2026 Crafts Bazaar, if you're interested in creating or receiving physical fanworks.
FTH 2026 Calendar
Monday, Jan 26th: creator signups open for both the auction and the craft bazaar
Sunday, Feb 8th: creator signups close for the main auction; craft bazaar signups remain open!
Friday, Feb 27th: browsing period begins, craft bazaar opens
Tuesday, March 3rd, 8am ET: auction bidding opens; craft bazaar signups close
Saturday, March 7th, 8pm ET: auction bidding closes
Wednesday, Mar 18th: auction donations due; craft stalls close
Thursday, Dec 31st: fanworks due
We're excited to be back for another round, and we hope you are too! After all, the world needs us more than ever: our donations, our community care, and our joyful and inspiring fanworks. We need one another right now, and FTH is a great way to make that happen.
The dark polyomino at the center of this figure, devised by Craig S. Kaplan, has an unusual property: It can be surrounded snugly with copies of itself, leaving no overlaps or gaps. In this case, the “corona” (red) can be surrounded with a second corona (amber), itself also composed of copies of the initial shape. But that’s as far as we can get — there’s no way to create a third corona using the same shape.
That gives the initial shape a “Heesch number” of 2 — the designation is named for German geometer Heinrich Heesch, who had proposed this line of study in 1968.
Shapes needn’t be polyominos: Heesch himself devised the example below, the union of a square, an equilateral triangle, and a 30-60-90 triangle:
It earns a Heesch number of 1, as it can bear only the single corona shown.
Can all positive integers be Heesch numbers? That’s unknown. The Heesch number of the square is infinite, and that of the circle is zero. The highest finite number reached so far is 6.
Kat Spada: Today, I’m talking to Rachel Manija Brown, a writer who’s published over 30 books, and opened up Paper & Clay Bookshop in late 2024. Rachel, will you tell me about why you decided to open a bookshop?
Rachel Brown: I had never intended to open a bookshop. I always thought it was one of those idle daydreams that people who love reading and books have. I never planned to actually do it because I didn’t think it would be successful—they frequently go out of business. But after I moved to Crestline, which is a very small town in the California mountains, the little town did not have a bookshop.
It had a shop that was kind of a bookshop. I would say about ten percent of its inventory was books, but it was primarily gifts and herbs and crystals and things like that. But it had a really great atmosphere, people loved it, the people who worked there were really great. And all the kids in town used to hang out there, especially the queer and trans and otherwise kind of misfit kids. And I used to hang out there.
[When it went] out of business, I was so sad at the idea of the mountain losing its only bookshop. Especially the thought that all the queer, trans, bookish, and otherwise misfit teenagers, like I had once been, were going to lose their safe space.
I started daydreaming about opening it myself, and I thought, I love this idea so much, maybe in a couple of years when I have actual preparation, I’ll open a bookshop. Then I realized it was at was such a good location, that I would never get that good of a location again. It’s smack in the middle of the tourist district, every person who visits Crestline walks right past it.
Unfortunately, this was all while I was in Bulgaria for a month. So, I spent some time frantically trying to take over the lease, which was extremely difficult from another country. I couldn’t take possession of the shop until November 1st, and I really wanted to open it in time to get all the Christmas customers. And I have a tiny house, so I couldn’t really buy very much, because I had no place to put it. So I took possession of the shop on November 1st, and I opened on November 14th.
I've posted the rest of the edited transcript below the cut. ( Read more... )
Sens could easily have a large chunk of the fastest growing demographic in hockey fall in their lap. Just, a giant pile of money fall in their laps, and they are working hard to make sure it doesn't happen.
The Sens, on top of everything else, signed a famous homophobe this morning. As a goalie, even!
Hello to all members, passers-by, curious onlookers, and shy lurkers, and welcome to our regular daily check-in post. Just leave a comment below to let us know how your current projects are progressing, or even if they're not.
Checking in is NOT compulsory, check in as often or as seldom as you want, this community isn't about pressure it's about encouragement, motivation, and support. Crafting is meant to be fun, and what's more fun than sharing achievements and seeing the wonderful things everyone else is creating?
There may also occasionally be questions, but again you don't have to answer them, they're just a way of getting to know each other a bit better.
This Week's Question: What are your crafting goals for 2026?
If anyone has any questions of their own about the community, or suggestions for tags, questions to be asked on the check-in posts, or if anyone is interested in playing check-in host for a week here on the community, which would entail putting up the daily check-in posts and responding to comments, go to the Questions & Suggestions post and leave a comment.
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