There are no free speech rights in the workplace beyond what your boss allows you

GrapheneOS has a duress password: a different PIN you can type in at any unlock prompt that tells your phone to wipe your SIM and contents

Silly Europe. Have you ever known US to do a right thing without trying all the wrong things first? Love, frustrated Americans

This is the future I want to live in

I really appreciate the work you put into making these videos. I love your microscopy, for one thing. You always have excellent contrast and make it really easy to tell who you’re shooting without needing a pointer and adding the details like the magnification, speed, and subject give my brain some context to better understand what’s happening. Thank you!

Look, I’m not here to GIS anything. That’s my pinball monitor.

I’ve had my ravelry account for 15ish years, but fell off using it after about 2015. Here’s a human-generated summary:

The content is a dream; the UI/UX is a straight up nightmare. 😅 Once you get used to it, it’s a fantastic resource for fiber artists with a few main components to it: big libraries of information, the ability to track your various projects, and community discussion.

There’s a pattern search with tons of filters to help you find your next project, and every designer who wants to get their name out there lists on ravelry. Photos from both the designers and users who have uploaded their project details give you an idea of what the project will look like. Tons of patterns are available for free, but there are loads more for sale as PDFs. There’s also information on the different yarns out there (including users who may be looking to sell a particular brand/line/color/lot #) and yarn stores/sellers, both small/local and big box. The local yarn shop search is nice if you’re in a far off place and want to bring home souvenir fiber or if you’re trying to get an idea of what the fiber community is like in a new place.

The notebook/projects function is really powerful. It lets you keep track of everything about your project: your progress, what size tools you’re using, the info off your yarn tags, pattern name/designer/link/images, and any notes you want to add. I treat my projects section like a lab notebook, making notes of any challenges I encounter with the yarn or the pattern, what resources and fixes I used, any changes I made and what the results were, you name it. If someone sees a picture of something I made, I want them to be able to see what I did to get there in the project page.

The community aspect is the big driver, though. Forums for basically every interest under the sun. Some designers have their own forums, which makes finding or getting human help with their patterns easier.

It’s really, really easy to fall into a ravelry rabbit hole, same way it’s easy to lose hours trawling Wikipedia when you get your hooks into something interesting.

Here’s a look behind the velvet curtain (lol some screencaps from my account) for anybody interested:

Cool rocks!

It’s super cool that you make your own pigments. What do you use them in? Do you post about them and your work with them somewhere? I’d love to read about it.

I love sending and receiving handwritten letters! I don’t do it enough. Thank you for the reminder that handwritten mail is generally happy mail.

All these Mexicos and he gets pissy about no one wanting to call it the “gulf of 'murica” 🙄

Hahaha guy used to tip with concert tickets! They were such a hot commodity

I was born on Long Island in the '70s and have a congenital predisposition to fucking LOVE Billy Joel. Also, it’s illegal to be from Long Island and not like Billy Joel. I love Billy Joel.

Turns out, I also love memes calling him out for how much harmonica there is in fucking Piano Man

Have you SEEN how much stuff he’s taken from other people trying to appease him so he doesn’t come after them next? He doesn’t care if they’re pissed as long as they keep handing over their lunch money

intergalactic disciplinary disciplinary intergalactic

another dimension another dimension another dimension another dimension

I don’t have any suggestions, I’m sorry. It’s something you hear about from other people who have lived here longer and just kind of observe happening to you and around you through daily life, the news, and Wikipedia rabbit holes. My favorite depiction of the Machine is in the show South Side. I have no idea how true to life it is, but they capture the spirit of Chicago politics really well.

Lol back in 2019-2020, I volunteered with Marie Newman’s campaign. She was a progressive Democrat running for the House of Representatives, Illinois District 3, as a challenger to the incumbent Dan Lipinski (also a Democrat, but a socially conservative blue dog Dem, so he voted against things like abortion and health care). Here’s the thing about Dan Lipinski: he basically inherited the position from his father and kept it for seven terms. How does that work? Rep. Bill Lipinski ran for re-election in the Dem primary, won it, and then retired. He talked the IL Democratic Party into replacing him with his son on the election ballot. Here in northern Illinois (I don’t know how far the political machine reaches out from Chicago), the dem races are the only races because nobody up here votes republican. (Sidenote: Chuy Garcia, a progressive Representative from IL-4, got reprimanded last month for doing something similar: on the day of the deadline to register for the ballot, he waited until there were only a few hours left and announced his retirement. His chief of staff stepped forward as the only Dem eligible to register because she had already collected all the signatures she needed.)

With that background in mind, let’s get back to my anecdote! I was volunteering for this upstart campaign and I come into the office to all this chatter one day. It was a week or so until the primary, and even busier than expected, so I asked another volunteer what was up. They were trying to catch up on stuff they’d had planned for the previous day, when they’d been unable to work because someone from Lipinski’s campaign physically cut power to the office. If I remember correctly, the power cut was only to the section of the building where Newman’s campaign office and a couple others were, the kind of disruption that took some research to pull off. A breaker getting flipped could’ve been fixed in minutes, maybe an hour if it took that long for someone to go and check it. The power line was cut and getting a line worker to do the repair took them the whole day. Despite the Democratic machine’s best efforts, Newman won the seat. She held it right up until 2023, when they gerrymandered it out from under her.

You do not defy the Machine.

It’s Illinois, so there are a lot of politics in play that aren’t usually an issue in most of the US. If someone in charge of my post office snubbed the wrong person at a work event, it wouldn’t be surprising if the snub-ee did things like moving money around to stop an order of new mail trucks from being deployed to our routes. (That’s not a democrat or republican thing, it’s an Illinois political machine thing.)

However, bigger political issues come into play, too. When DeJoy first took over, people in parts of my House district weren’t getting mail at all. He was removing mail sorting machines from post offices, for cryin’ out loud. Apartment buildings had package dumps that the residents had to comb through to hopefully find their stuff, if it hadn’t been stolen. Letters and packages were getting delayed or lost and being reported as delivered. (I’ve had at least one package get reported as delivered that showed up in my mailbox a week later, but a two-day delay between report and delivery is much more common.) People getting government checks and medication in the mail were left waiting for things that might or might not show up, no indicators of where they were, and nobody to ask for a status update. Just “item delivered at mailbox/front door” and nothing.

Ten years ago, it was $0.49 to mail a first class letter that would be delivered, pretty reliably, in about three days. Now that services have been “brought more into line with existing services” like FedEx and UPS, it’s $0.78 and shows up whenever.

Right now, first class mail to homes in the Chicago area is taking two WEEKS to arrive due to holiday increases. I don’t think it’d be this bad at tax or voting deadlines, but it’s good to know what kind of variability you can expect, especially with all of the changes made to the US postal service since 2017.

Fashionable tan egg rounds out the best advent calendar this year very nicely!

Egg is perfect

Not off the shelf smartwatches; wrist-worn tracking devices issued by ICE.

“The device was not an ordinary smart watch made by Apple or Samsung, but a special type that US Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) had mandated the woman wear at all times, allowing the agency to track her. The device was beeping when she entered the hospital, indicating she needed to charge it, and she worried that if the battery died, ICE agents would think she was trying to disappear, the hospital workers recalled. She told them that, just days earlier, she had been put on a deportation flight to Mexico, but the pilot refused to let her fly because she was so close to giving birth.”

What a fucking dystopia. The only thing that gives me hope for America’s future is knowing that this is part of our established pattern: we’ll never do a right thing without trying all the wrong things first, and we’ll only get there kicking and screaming the whole way. This is part of that wrong-things-first approach, and we’ve got a good deal of kicking and screaming already… I really hope we get to the right-things-last part soon.