I've been reading Malcolm Harris' Palo Alto. It's basically a Tankie history of California. It dovetails nicely with Mike Davis' City of Quartz - quotes it in several places, in fact - which is basically a true crime history of California.

Palo Alto argues that the modern American world exists because of conservative ideologues and war profiteers who resorted to crime and shadiness to rule the world. City of Quartz argues that the modern American world exists because of petty grifters who resorted to conservative ideology as protective coloration. You get enough people to fondle the elephant and eventually you'll know it's an elephant. Harris' Palo Alto is big on how horrible everyone in California has been because they're a bunch of racist capitalists; Davis' City of Quartz is big on how horrible everyone in California has been because the whole place runs on graft and if you want to get ahead, the Tragedy of the Commons is that way. Palo Alto is chockablock with opinion and footnotes to the opinions of others; City of Quartz is chockablock with references.

Palo Alto's boogeyman is Herbert Hoover, who despite losing election went back to California and became a power-broker for another 40 years. City of Quartz's boogeyman is William Mulholland, who despite a complete lack of formal training, despite a body count hundreds deep, despite causing a guerilla conflict that lasted for years and despite a decades-long documented history of nefariousness and graft remains one of the most venerated people in California history.

What's interesting is that City of Quartz was written in 1990. California was an aggressively Republican stronghold, had voted conservatively in every election it had ever participated in and Darryl Gates was mostly famous for creating SWAT in response to the SLA shootout. Palo Alto came out in March of this year and Harris' bridge from the staunchly conservative Republican politics of the 20th century to the staunchly liberal politics of the 21st is (waves hands) "apple."

Even though he name-checks Prop 187.

It's funny - conservatives ran California from stem to stern. Then the LA riots happened, then all the gringos voted for "stop and frisk latinos" by a 58-41 margin and within 10 years California was an aggressively liberal bastion, Republicans never to matter for the next 20 years at least. THAT, to me, is the interesting parallel. Republicans made the 2004 election all about banning the gays and within 10 years we had legal gay marriage in all 50 states.

The Republican Party is currently at "Ackshully, slavery was good for slaves" and I think the whiplash is going to be amazing.

Wrote glowing summaries for my interns. It was pretty fun, hopefully for them too. They mostly spent those three weeks getting maths lessons only for me to say "Oh, geez, look at the time!", but I doubt anyone thinks this time was wasted. And they did help me with a project that's been on the back burner for almost five years now. I offered to help them extend this stuff and get it published, but don't expect to hear back until October/November. Can't blame them; summer's precious even if you have to work through it. And the weather has been super-mild so far, so that's even less incentive to stay inside and do maths.

Xenonauts 2 went out, and I'm in this in-between state of liking the new thing yet longing for all the mods that were left behind. The devs and community are cool, though, and I hope there won't be too much of a learning curve to port/write my stuff. Wouldn't mind a real modding API or something, so that people aren't learning through word of mouth or by dissecting the thing composed of loosely associated XML(?) files.

There's been some buzz recently about this thing. Apart from the usual "wait until it's replicated," or people bringing up recent retractions or hoaxes, I'd like to simply say that any paper on (a breakthrough in) superconductivity that doesn't include temperature-resistance curve is essentially worthless. Sure, you can go "doesn't resistance relate to Debye temperature, Bloch-Gruneisen model go brrr?," but one is an inferred quantity while the other is measured directly. Go with direct measurements, especially when they're as bloody standard as resistance.

Australia seems to be full of ignorant, opinionated arseholes, who vote for ignorant, opinionated arseholes.

I feel like we were not always like this, but we have become like this.

This old post from a thousand years ago seems relevant. I think the Palawa people would disagree with John Howard. I would like to ask them, but they were exterminated.

We're staying with my partner's grandmother while we try to find a good place to live. My partner's grandmother is Jewish and we were talking earlier and I mentioned I have family who has a Shoah Foundation Testimony, so while my partner was at work/visiting other family, her grandmother and I started watching the interview. We're about halfway through but stopped because it's very emotionally draining as I'm sure you can imagine. But I did some googling and found out someone a few months ago uploaded the entire thing to YouTube. Don't recognize the name at all, is it long lost family or some rando uploading it? The world may never know...

I've finally worked up the courage to share some of my writing projects with impartial readers, for some constructive feedback.

It's been great. The constructive feedback is on point and highlighting things I just hadn't thought about, or noticed, or thought was working but evidently wasn't. I'm really grateful for it. Already edited things in/out/shuffling around.

The positive feedback has also been lovely to receive (as it would be). One reader assumed I was a woman because of the relatable way I was portraying the female MC in the story, then was pleasantly surprised to discover I'm a dude. Dialogue getting some good praise, realistic interpretations of how people might react to things, world feels connected and sense of both scale and time passing has been captured. Overall, it's viewed as a fun read, and each time the person provided feedback they asked for more to read over.

Another project I got feedback on was a series of short horror/sci-fi stories that I was hoping build a little anthology out of. So far each person has said "Would love to see this a full blown adventure" which I was hoping to hear. I wanted to write some interesting tidbits and capture enough of someone's imagination or interest that they'd like to see more of it, and more fleshed out.

Feels good. Onwards.