Io Saturnalia! ✨

Temperature: https://arctic.noaa.gov/report-card/report-card-2025/

Eating: Still setting the menu for next week.

Drinking: Can we save that for Christmas? Just had a toast or two to celebrate our silver wedding anniversary, which sounds impossible, twenty-five years, I mean. Then again, get married in your twenties and you've been up to quite a lot by the time you hit fifty. 🥂

Listening: to...you have exactly one guess to get this right.

Watching: cheesy Christmas movies.

Reading: on the fun Romans used to have this time of year makes Christian Christmas celebrations look suspiciously like cultural appropriation. Add to that all the Persian and Jewish and Latin American influences and it's quite a colorful quilt you get.
 
Writing: digital holiday messages. Oh I still send out cards in the hopes of receiving them, but with the old guard taking leave...not that many cards and letters arriving these days. And that's a pity.

Thinking: it's life according to Dickinson, as I am out with lanterns, looking for myself, trying to decide which possible future course has legs. Good thing Santa Lucia stopped by on Saturday to light the way as we have not a single flake of snow. Oh well, there's light and colors aplenty indoors, so I think we'll manage.

Feeling: I need a little Christmas, right this very minute... And the syncretistic version is fine by me. Happy holidays, sweetie darlings, wherever you are. 💝

Thanksgrieving

Temperature: a rainy 7/45 degrees. 

Eating: falafels.

Drinking: gingerbread coffee.

Listening: to a jazzy Christmas playlist curated by my youngest. I most certainly am, less than four weeks to go, that's nothing!

Watching: Generation X creatives take a beating. Good thing we're a resilient, resourceful bunch, children of a string of recessions, never any certainty about anything. Some would say cynics. I say we're realists. And thankful we had the optimism and opportunity to pursue careers in arts and media, academia and culture, giving the world the best of our skills and talents.

Reading: the US-Russia peace proposal was like reading Kremlin's wish list to Father Frost. What a bunch of immoral and illegal BS.
 
Writing: condolences and other messages of support and sympathy. 

Thinking: Just like no one came to the aid of the blue-collar worker when manufacturing jobs were redistributed, no one is coming to shield creatives from the devastation caused by AI. I hear new jobs are on the horizon, but no one seems to know what these new jobs are and how many openings there will actually be. We don't have time to wait, or waste, we need to keep moving. Where to, now that is the question.

Feeling: Sure, I have a horse in this race and as much to lose as any of my friends and colleagues, but that's not all I'm apprehensive about. Don't you feel uneasy when AI companies would rather not talk about the monstrous environmental footprint they produce and what that means for the climate and all of us? Or how refining language models so far as to make people believe that what these programs produce is actual, factual, carefully deliberated thoughts and answers leads people to use these programs in their daily lives and decision making, wholesale? When in fact, after racing to gather and input as much data as possible, racist and sexist and all manner of toxic thinking and language is now as integral a part of these programs as say Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia Britannica. Or how mercenary their piracy-based business model is? Are you okay with this, all of it? I'm not.

Love your rage, not your cage

Since mankind's dawn, a handful of oppressors have accepted the responsibility over our lives that we should have accepted for ourselves. By doing so, they took our power. By doing nothing, we gave it away. We've seen where their way leads, through camps and wars, towards the slaughterhouse.

From the graphic novel V for Vendetta, written by Alan Moore, illustrated by David Lloyd

Mariah is defrosting, it's almost time! 🌟

But first, suspenseful Halloween to my dearest sweetie darlings. 🖤

[Yeah, when are you going to reveal what this new project of yours is? Yes, you. I hope it is what I hope it is because if it is...fantastic.]

Monday (I have Friday on my mind)

Temperature: a sunny 10/50 degrees.

Eating: Maybe later.

Drinking: tea.

Listening: to the troll-in-chief on his Life of a Showboat Tour brings to mind all the traits of the dark triad.

Watching: Slow Horses.

Reading: on AI from several angles and feeling more and more uneasy the deeper I delve. Automation bias, anybody? Seriously, despite hominid appearances, there's no one home. There's no one on the other end, and when a system gets so complex you can't decipher or understand its inner logic, you gotta ask yourself should I trust this thing to make an assessment or decision for me. And the piracy involved...mind-boggling.

Writing: something that would lift your from your funk and sling you straight into the depths of despair. So let's not go there right now, it's only Monday after all.

Thinking: I get to meet an old and dear dear friend over the weekend so I've already got my eye on Friday. I know, still only Monday. Gaah!

Feeling: an itch in my nasal cavity. Don't. You. Dare.