All right. Enough dithering.

A long workday with one difficult meeting ahead.

Be good to your noggins.
Be good to your hearts.
Disassemble faulty billionaires;
we could use the spare parts!

Today I have a meeting with someone a little more stressful. I almost prefer full-on MAGA to folks living in a state of denial about how far-right curious they are. Always leaning credulously into far-right pundits, never showing an awareness of baseline news reports (only far-right reactions to them)... More concerned, really, about *appearing* to be far-right than interrogating their views.

I wish there weren't so many GOP-curious Canadians right now, but good grief are these ever bad times.

Le shock! Le gasp!

"Norwegian oil and gas company Equinor has admitted over-reporting the performance of a flagship carbon capture and storage project by about 30 percent due to defective monitoring equipment, underscoring risks associated with plans to scale the technology as a climate solution, DeSmog can reveal."

#ClimateCrisis #Environment #BigOil

https://www.desmog.com/2024/10/28/norways-equinor-admits-it-over-reported-amount-of-carbon-captured-at-flagship-project-for-years/

Today, we've got another piece from the 1940s, this time in the middle of World War II. It's extraordinary how much nuance was possible in film-making at the time, compared to many portraits of Jingoism in mainstream media today.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp can be viewed two ways, depending on how well you know your military history--and it offers lessons that continue to matter to our understanding of war today.

#War #Film #History #MediaLiteracy #Propaganda

https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/the-layered-propaganda-of-colonel

Newsletter written by hand while oot n aboot. Now home to write it up and post!

(Nice change of pace, though. I love the difference in thinking that comes from writing freehand.)

Well that "brief chat" was 2.5 hours long.

🙂

And very very very promising!

Walkies, then newsletterin', then story submittin'. This will have been a good day.

Today's piece is going to be on The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943), but good grief, does it ever suck sometimes to be reminded that we've done all this before. We humans never learn.

I was too busy running (🥳) for any photos this morning, so have a merry set of roadside moocows from yesterday.

I have a mysterious meeting in a few hours (no idea what the topic is; the organizer just wants to have a "brief chat"), and tons of other work to cram in before it happens.

May your days be splendid and your weeks, spooky - except when it comes to electoral discourse, which is haunted enough!

Some days I pass as normal.

Other days you can catch me muttering a word to myself over and over, because I just love how it feels to say it, until I forget what it means.

Assiduously
Assiduously
Assiduously

In other news, I've got two emails to schedule before bed, and then I hope I can leap up at dawn and go for a run to start a full day off right. It's been a while, but I'd once again like to live more... oh, gosh, I feel like there's a word for this... 🤔 Eh, it'll come to me!

Night CoSo!

💛

#Random pick-me-ups, for anyone feeling compliment-deprived:

1) The work you put into your community makes SUCH a difference. Thank you for doing it!

2) Hot damn, you de-escalated the pants off that crisis!

3) Your wit positively sizzled today with your clients/boss/in-laws. Well done!

4) Have you done something different? Because you look extra radiant tonight.

5) You showed up for your hurting self so well today, and it matters so much. 💙

6) Who's a good boy/girl?!
(You are! You are!)

BookTube o'clock! Still playing catch-up on magazine reviews, but that just means spending a lot of time with great SFF stories. Today, it's the Clarkesworld September 2024 issue, which has some excellent work in the fiction and non-fiction department.

Remember to support the work you love! #SFF #ScienceFiction #BetterWorldsTheory https://youtu.be/4fVQISsLmck

Name a better commercial campaign than Long Long Man. I dares ya.

#CoSoHumour #CoSoAfterDark
https://youtu.be/6-1Ue0FFrHY

My afternoon plans were sidetracked by my eldest nephew calling to talk about his high school English homework, which *may* have involved a long digression into how much he enjoyed reading James Joyce's "Araby" and what it meant to him, and me trying not to get all weepy over the staying power of literature (and the amazing work of good teachers!).

Didn't get out the door for my pre-writing, VM-answering walk before he called, though, so... Round 2? 🙃

Walkies and talkies (answering VMs) before my next writing task?

Don't mind if I do~! 🍃

@Graci, how you doin', girl?

It's been a little while, so I'm just checking in.

I hope you're caught up in the very best of goofy wife-ing adventures, or filling the idle hours with some other wonderful campaign - but just in case this wee note finds you Going Through Things, I just wanted to send a heck of a lot of love your way.

Hope you're taking good care of yourself, and have all the tools and space you need to b̶u̶r̶y̶ t̶h̶e̶ b̶o̶d̶i̶e̶s̶ get back into your groove again soon. 💜

More so than other writing, I find that writing on philosophy is never finished--only abandoned. So, after dragging my heels on posting, here's Part 2 of my reflection on Peter Singer's "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" (1972). Partly for all, partly for paid subscribers, we look at systemic questions skirted by Singer's moral appeal to affluent people in his community.

Are we too hung up on trying to improve individual "goodness" in this deeply "un-good" world of ours?

https://open.substack.com/pub/mlclark/p/again-is-it-possible-to-be-good