Werd I/O

Happy birthday, Ma. I miss you.

This time last year I booked an AirBnb in Pacific Grove, right on the bay, because you had talked about wanting to visit Monterey and be by the water. It was a hard trip for you, but I’m so glad we did it.

I’m so glad we did a lot of things.

During the pandemic, I was with you most of the time. We had a ritual at the end of the night where I would help you walk up the six steps to your bedroom, help you into bed, and then help you brush your teeth if you weren’t feeling strong enough to do it in the bathroom. Sometimes, I would lie on the bed and we’d talk, although I know it eventually got too hard to hold up a conversation. I treasured those times. Most of all, I think about the hug we’d have at the top of the stairs; the feeling of your skin as I kissed your head.

I’m glad for the walks we would take in the small park near the house. I’d drive you down and pack your rolling walker with the built-in seat, and we’d stroll together, at your pace. Sometimes we’d just walk to the end of the road and back. But we’d talk and be together, just us. You’d ask me to time how long it took to get to the corner, and it was always shorter than you expected. You were so strong.

And even when you were tired and struggling, you were my mother. You worried that I worked too hard, and spent too long at work. At the time, I was frustrated with you; I’d fought hard to build a career from nothing. But what you were saying came from a place of love, and you were right. I’d fallen into a trap that a lot of people fall into, and you could see it. You worried about my health, my well-being, and my future, even when you had so much else to worry about.

I hear your advice every day. I try and live up to it and carry it with me. The last year has been untethered: after ten years of that journey with you, everything feels wrong. It’s like one of those movies where the protagonist wakes up and the world has changed around them in unsettling ways, but here there’s no key; there’s no way to get back. The mirror dimension is the world now. I’ve made weird knee-jerk decisions just to fill the void. I haven’t been exercising. I sleep poorly. I’m trying to practice what you wanted for me - it was all about being healthy, living a good life, standing up for myself and setting good boundaries - but right now I feel like I’m not there. I’m trying.

When we were lying on your bed, we talked a lot about how you wanted your death to go. We were all very clear about what you wanted, and I’m so sorry that it didn’t happen that way. You didn’t want to be in the hospital, surrounded by tubes and machines. You wanted to be in your home, surrounded by us. The hospital worked with us to bend the covid restrictions so we could all be with you, but we couldn’t take you home. You needed too much oxygen; I don’t remember if we explained that to you, but I hope we did. “It’s all happening so fast,” you told us. That last week was a waking nightmare and I wish I’d been smarter in it.

What happened next, in palliative care, will be with me for the rest of my life. I didn’t know how it would be. I don’t know if I (we) could have steered those last days to be different, but it was exactly what you didn’t want, and I’m going to be sorry forever. You were there for me in so many ways for so many years and then, when it really counted, I couldn’t give you what you needed. You didn’t have agency in the way you left. It’s unforgivable. I don’t know if I will ever get to a point where I can forgive myself, or if I should.

I hoped I would dream about you; that I’d get to talk to you in some form, even if I knew it was more me than you. I have dreamt about you, but every time, even now, you’ve been in pain. I just want to tell you I love you one more time. I want to tell you I’m sorry.

I have all these videos of you. We recorded your life story over a few different sessions, which I’m afraid to say I still haven’t stitched into one video and shared with everyone. Maybe I’ll do that today; it seems like a fitting celebration of your life. I have videos of you at your singing recitals - it’s still incredible to me that you joined a singing class post lung transplant. I even have two videos, one before your lung transplant and one more recently, of you telling me you love me. I’m glad to have them, and to hear your voice and remember. But playing them also feels like listening to an echo: another ripple from a giant hole that has been torn out of the universe.

You were so game. You made the decision to move to Europe when you were pregnant, because that would be a better place to raise a baby. You gave birth in a foreign country where you didn’t really speak the language, thousands of miles away from your family. And it worked; it all worked out. You moved to England and made Oxford your home, only moving back to California so you could help care for my Oma. I felt so privileged to do the same to help care for you; you had shown me the way. Life is an adventure: it’s exciting. We’re capable of doing, and dealing with, so much. A good life means building and enjoying and thriving on your own terms, not consuming some template that other people have set out for you. There’s no comfort in sameness.

You were amazing. So many people have families that value conformity, or wealth, or tradition. Mine valued humanity, ethics, and building a meaningful life from first principles. You modeled that for me incredibly from the moment I was born. My horizons were broad and my world was big. No idea was off-limits to discuss; nothing was off-limits to explore; you never told me to follow a set path or do something because that was just how it was done. You were never parochial; never petty or small-minded. You fought for equality before I was born, literally on the streets and in courtrooms, and fought for it in everything you did as I grew up. You were smart and fierce and kind and silly and patient and loving.

Thank you. I miss you. I love you. I’m sorry.

One of the things a realtor will often do for you when you’re selling a house is to set up a website for it. It’s often built by the people who take the photos, and is created to a set template. It turns out there are a handful of services that exist to do just that: host a single-page site that showcases your home.

We’re selling our family home in Santa Rosa - the one my parents lived in for a decade - and I’m a web developer. Don’t get me wrong, these are nice sites, and we’ll probably set one up. But I’m also going to set up my own. Because of course I am. It sounds like fun, and I want to have fun with it, but wouldn’t it be great if it brought in the buyer?

I’m giving myself a few restrictions:

It’ll be a hand-rolled static site. No frameworks for the HTML, JS, or CSS, and no pre-set templates: just me, a text editor, and some design tools. It’s a home with shared ownership - everyone gets a say on the content and design - but I’m going to build it.

It needs to get an A for SEO, site performance, and security.

And it needs to be up over the next two weeks. There’s a lot going on, so this is a bit of a challenge.

Wish me luck. And hey, if you’re in the market for a three bedroom, two and a half bathroom single-family home in the heart of wine country …

This is my monthly roundup of the books, articles, and streaming media I found interesting. Here's my list for March, 2022. This was an intense month, so a shorter list than usual.

Streaming Media

Severance. My kind of science fiction: darkly satirical, with a dramatic vice that closes with each new episode. Really beautifully done.

Notable Articles

Business

Epic Games Acquires Bandcamp as 'Fortnite' Maker Expands Into Music. “Bandcamp will play an “important role in Epic’s vision to build out a creator marketplace ecosystem for content, technology, games, art, music and more,” the games company said. According to Bandcamp, under its revenue model artists receive net an average of 82% of every sale.” Fascinating!

Equal Pay Day: What can transparency laws do to the gender pay gap? “After years of little progress toward pay equity, more and more states and localities are passing pay transparency laws that eliminate the secrecy around salaries and could be a powerful tool for eliminating the gender pay gap.”

More Employees Are Saying That Tesla’s Factory Is Horrifically Racist. “One single mother said she was excited to work for Tesla but was fired because she made a complaint about Black workers being call the N-word on the assembly line. According to the report originally published in the LA Times, other employees were also called racial slurs and insults and penalized for telling management.”

Climate

In a US first, California will pilot solar-panel canopies over canals. “India already has solar panels over canals, but the mile-long Project Nexus in California’s San Joaquin Valley will be the first of its kind in the US.” Go Turlock!

Crypto

Executive Order on Ensuring Responsible Development of Digital Assets. “We must take strong steps to reduce the risks that digital assets could pose to consumers, investors, and business protections; financial stability and financial system integrity; combating and preventing crime and illicit finance; national security; the ability to exercise human rights; financial inclusion and equity; and climate change and pollution.”

Ukraine Is Selling NFTs to Finance Its Military. “While it might seem like a weird attempt to gin up funds, Ukraine claims to have raised more than $54 million so far through cryptocurrency donations in order to help fund war and relief efforts in the embattled country. So there’s definitely something to be said for jumping on the crypto train to raise money.”

The (Edited) Latecomer's Guide to Crypto. “Here, a group of around fifteen cryptocurrency researchers and critics have done what the New York Times apparently won’t.”

Exxon Mobil reportedly gets in on Bitcoin mining. “Exxon Mobil has begun a pilot program to set up Bitcoin miners at an oil well in North Dakota. The project reportedly runs off 18 million ft³ of natural gas that would otherwise be flared.” Oh, great.

Culture

MC Hammer ‘Will Beat Yo' Ass’—and Other Hard Tales of the MTV-Friendly Rapper. “Serch claims the $50,000 hit was confirmed by fellow Def Jam artist Eric B., and was supposed to be carried out by the Los Angeles crips. In a later interview, Serch said fear and anger over the incident has never left him.”

Dolly Parton’s “9 to 5” Adjusted for Late-Stage Capitalism . “Working 8 to 6, but they call you after hours / Barely gettin’ by, lots of crying in the shower / You might prequalify, won’t even hurt your credit / Ran out of sick days—well, I hope y’all don’t catch it”

Grimes Reveals Y, Her New Baby Daughter With Elon Musk, in Cover Interview. Come for the secret baby, stay for an interview that makes Grimes seem like a pretty cool person.

The case for induction cooking. “But for all the sexiness of cooking with gas (a concept bolstered by aggressive lobbying and advertising from the natural gas industry), it has been shown to be catastrophic for the environment, emitting potent greenhouse gases like methane into the atmosphere. Worse, a recent study demonstrated that 75 percent of these emissions occur when the stove is off.” This is mostly about how amazing induction is for cooking - I’m envious.

Notable Sandwiches #20: The British Rail Sandwich. “The British Rail sandwich is not really a sandwich at all, but rather a category of sandwiches—modest constructions of hard-boiled egg, cheese and tomato, pressed luncheon meat, tongue, boiled ham, cucumber, prawns, etc., offered on the trains traversing Britain’s many kilometers of railway, particularly (though not exclusively) during the four-and-a-half decades in which it was operated by the her majesty’s government.” Ah, memories.

Will Smith Did a Bad, Bad Thing. “When Will Smith stormed onto the Oscar stage to strike Chris Rock for making a joke about his wife’s short hair, he did a lot more damage than just to Rock’s face. With a single petulant blow, he advocated violence, diminished women, insulted the entertainment industry, and perpetuated stereotypes about the Black community.”

Media

Google is releasing an open source harassment filter for journalists . “Harassment Manager also lets users download a standalone report containing abusive messages; this creates a paper trail for their employer or, in the case of illegal content like direct threats, law enforcement. For now, however, there’s not a standalone application that users can download. Instead, developers can freely build apps that incorporate its functionality and services using it will be launched by partners like the Thomson Reuters Foundation.”

Politics

California reparations for slavery descendants only. “After more than six hours of debate Tuesday, California’s reparations task force voted that only Black Californians who can prove a direct lineage to enslaved ancestors will be eligible for the statewide — and first-in-the nation — initiative to address the harms and enduring legacy of slavery.” Progress.

Science

Associations between alcohol consumption and gray and white matter volumes in the UK Biobank. “Here, we show that the negative associations between alcohol intake and brain macrostructure and microstructure are already apparent in individuals consuming an average of only one to two daily alcohol units, and become stronger as alcohol intake increases.” Drinking any amount of alcohol shrinks your brain.

Dual use of artificial-intelligence-powered drug discovery. “An international security conference explored how artificial intelligence (AI) technologies for drug discovery could be misused for de novo design of biochemical weapons. A thought experiment evolved into a computational proof.” Nightmare fuel.

Crows possess higher intelligence long thought primarily human. “Research unveiled on Thursday in Science finds that crows know what they know and can ponder the content of their own minds, a manifestation of higher intelligence and analytical thought long believed the sole province of humans and a few other higher mammals.”

Society

How COVID pressure led single moms to turn to coliving with other adults. “The move to cohabitation eased a significant amount of pressure for Villagomez-Morales at a time when parents, but especially single parents, were being squeezed on all sides — by child care, loss of work and extreme burnout. That, mixed with a housing market that has become increasingly inhospitable to low-wage people, and especially moms, has more single parents looking into the benefits of cohabitation to ride out the pandemic.”

After George Floyd’s murder, police built a secretive surveillance machine that lives on. “We found evidence of a complex engine of surveillance tailor-made for keeping close tabs on protesters and sharing that information among local and federal agencies, regardless of whether the subjects were suspected of any wrongdoing.”

Tatiana Perebyinis and two children identified as those seen dead in viral Lynsey Addario photo from Ukraine. “Photos flashing on his Twitter feed showed four people lying next to a World War II memorial just outside Kyiv after they were fired on by the Russian military. One of them was his wife, and two were his children.” Pure horror.

Mark and Lily Osler: Governor’s order on transgender youth cruel, short-sighted. “Because Gov. Abbott has moved to threaten transgender kids by criminalizing the kind of support they need, it’s time for Lily and me to tell this part of our family story and to address the harm Gov. Abbott is doing.”

In most states, over half of all women of color earn less than a living wage. “In nine states, 50 percent or more of all women workers are earning less than $15 an hour. But in 40 states, 50 percent or more of all women of color — Black women, Latinas, Native American women and Asian American and Pacific Islander women — are earning below a living wage. In 23 states, 60 percent or more of all women of color have hourly earnings under $15.”

What Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination means to Black women. “At the start of this week’s hearing, The 19th spoke to people who gathered on the steps of the high court about what her historic journey to the most powerful bench in the United States means.”

These Companies Are Clamoring for Women's Dollars As They Help Tank Pro-Women Legislation. “Companies clamoring for women’s dollars are making huge donations to politicians and political action committees specifically designed to tank legislation aiming to lift women and families out of poverty, according to new research obtained by Jezebel.”

Technology

Twitter Wants to Reinvent Itself, by Merging the Old With the New. “Now, over a decade later, Twitter is reversing course. The company is pursuing the sort of decentralization Mr. [Blaine] Cook championed. It is funding an independent effort to build a so-called open protocol for social media. It is also weaving cryptocurrency into its app, and opening up to developers who want to build custom features for Twitter.” Quite a lovely piece about decentralization.

The web is for everyone: Our vision for the evolution of the web. “We believe to make the web a better place we need to focus our work on these nine areas.” From Mozilla.

EU's Digital Markets Act will require Apple to open iMessage. “European regulators on Thursday revealed their plan to rein in the anti-competitive practices of Big Tech and fundamentally remake how some of the world’s most powerful companies do business. The rules, which target tech giants like Apple, Amazon, Meta and Google, are far-reaching and would have huge ramification for those companies’ software and services.” Good.

Is tech still failing Black communities? Data says yes. “There was just a 1% increase in representation of Black workers in technical roles at large tech companies between the years of 2014 and 2021, according to the report titled State of Tech Diversity: The Black Tech Ecosystem.”

Facebook paid Republican strategy firm to malign TikTok. “In October, Targeted Victory worked to spread rumors of the “Slap a Teacher TikTok challenge” in local news, touting a local news report on the alleged challenge in Hawaii. In reality, no such challenge existed on TikTok.”

Note: I've been using the term "outsider art" incorrectly, and didn't realize it was problematic. I've lightly edited this piece and will be mindful of this going forward. I apologize to the artists I incorrectly categorized.

I bought a Jean Smith painting the other day.

Jean is the lead singer of Mecca Normal, which was one of the early riot grrrl bands (see also: Bikini Kill). More recently, she’s started to make her paintings available online for a hundred dollars each in support of opening the Free Artist Residency for Progressive Social Change. Daily, she posts a painting, and commenters try and buy one.

She could easily sell them for multiples of the asking price, but this is more interesting: accessible, sold directly, and as indie as it comes.

As the New York Times wrote a few years ago:

For once, social media is helping a creative economy be more equitable. The artist earns what she wishes to earn, with plenty left over to give away. And for less than it would cost to frame a dorm-room poster, you can have a daily encounter with the sublime.

I’d vastly prefer this than some establishment art setup, with all its attendant schmoozing and gatekeeping. It’s one reason why I’m also a big fan of the Creative Growth Art Center. For me, good art changes perspectives and lets you think about the world from a new angle; it’s hard to do that if it comes squarely from the mainstream.

And for me, it has to be physical. Is digital art interesting? Sure. But I’m so embedded in the digital that I’m fascinated with the physicality of physical work. My friend Sadie makes these incredible stained glass pieces, which come straight from the heart, and sometimes literally are hearts. They’re beautiful, and they bend light and cast shadows and take up space.

I’m so wrapped up in virtual space that people who can have this sort of effect on real space are magicians to me. I love it, and I suppose I’m a little bit envious, too. But I’m lucky to be able to collect their work and support what they do, at least in a small way. The openness and bravery it takes to create art is an inspiration to me, and the pieces themselves are often transformative. I’m grateful to have that in my life.

I’m loathe to criticize NFTs in themselves, because people are genuinely creating in that space (and on blockchains that don’t have a negative climate effect). But it’s not really for me. Instead, I’m excited to receive a genuine Jean Smith canvas, or a genuine Sadie Robison sculpture. I’m delighted by the underlying humanity and awed by the skill. And I’m always looking for more.