Taken from Bluesky, and shared here because it's important to remind ourselves to be careful whenever relying on AI.

CW for adult themes. 😉 Off to teach! G'night, you princes of Maine, you kings of New England.

#CoSoAfterDark #Memes

😁 A wee chuckle from Oxford Ref:

LIBERTY CABBAGE

During WWI any reference in the USA to things German was deemed unpatriotic, & this included foodstuffs. An alternative name had therefore to be found for sauerkraut, and the choice fell on liberty cabbage. The image appealed to was presumably of America as the land of the free, defending the liberty of the world against German tyranny. Similar inspirations were liberty sandwich for ‘hamburger sandwich’ [&] liberty measles for ‘German measles’.

And a modest proposal for a new news channel we can all follow until legacy media gets its shaving cream together...

#HypnoToad
#ItsProbablyProDemocracy

A non-alcoholic toast to everyone who's keeping sane in the US right now. I don't know how you do it! Your news cycles are "Homer losing his last hairs from stress" batty.

(And another to those who *aren't* keeping sane, because honestly, who on Earth could blame you for going nuts in this media economy?)

Still shaking off my world-grief today.

How are you doing, CoSo? What are you doing to bring a little light into your days?

Today's Tough Times Tuesday is another rough one.

I'd understand if folks really don't want to revisit the last nine months, and what they've brought out in us: the gamification of atrocity, the weaponization of data, the blatant schisms between local reports and how stories of Israel-Gaza manifested in Western discourse.

But I needed to grieve our indifference to truth and humanity in the throes of wartime missions, so I hope this serves anyone else in a similar mood.

https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/nine-months-at-war-with-our-own-worst

Okay. One English class, then an attempt to get to the halfway mark on this novelette draft (redoing a trunk story in a fresh document, with plot and character arcs rejiggered) before night's end. 🤞

The tricky part is that I have to add credible ghosties to my usually more empirically driven SF. I pulled it off once for an Analog story! Just need to work that magic again for this time-crunched call.

#AmTeaching, & then
#AmWriting

Night, 'Nauties! 😘

Much as I get angry at myself for fretting about my silly problems, I don't shame others for having struggles that aren't "starving on the street" serious.

Still, I wish I could help a sib who's depressed over unemployment in a highly first-world way: withdrawn & playing videogames night & day.

Canadian living allows people to be super isolated in financial distress, which just makes things differently bad.

I can help folks on the street here, but not my own kin sometimes.

Super super sucks.

Today's Monday Media Review reflects on how legacy media is still engaging in malinformation around election cycles. It's not that the issues they're foregrounding are without some merit, but there's a lost principle of proportionality here, and it's drumming up fear and training citizens to see only certain electoral outcomes as "wins". To advance more robust democracies, we have to remember what those entail.

#MediaLiteracy #Politics #Democracy
https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/when-legacy-media-gamifies-democracy

@Graci, I don't know if you've listened yet, but I was so ready to leap to Kate's defence in choosing her usual approach, even as the others lose decorum. She doesn't vent or come up with cute names for disaster! She just simply, firmly, and painstakingly lays out how terrible the last SCOTUS term was for democracy, and how sneakily it kicked key issues down the pike, without resorting to The Silly. 💛 Love her.

#Podcasts #SCOTUS #Politics
https://pca.st/episode/7ec5e387-6522-4f4d-a5b4-c8f79391ae59

Funny bilingual moment:

While writing tonight, I was trying to figure out how to edit a sentence so that it didn't have a dangling modifier in it... but the entire time, I was grumbling to myself, because the same sentence in Spanish would *never* have this issue in the first place.

Sometimes English is a real stinker. 🙃

(But the writing's going well, and I think I'll catch up with a BookTube/Monday Media Review twofer tomorrow, so all's well. Happy night, all you knights-errant and -sundry!)

Gosh, I'm so thankful to be among people who do so much to gentle our hurting world.

Thank you to all the artists who shared their work with us today.

Thank you to everyone sharing how they're fighting the good fight for democracy and its foundations in improved human agency.

And thank you to everyone being present with family (however one defines it) in good and hard times alike.

The world might be going to hell in a handbasket.

But what a *nice* handbasket we've got going for ourselves. 💛