My personal thoughts/opinions, or commentary.
Two Redditors collaborated and put together a Project 2025 Tracker dashboard. Objectives are link to sources, marked for status, subject, and affected agency. As of 2/12/2025, fascism in America is over a quarter of the way done.
A hill that I will die on: accessible seating tickets for events should not be available to the general public. These areas or sections are already scarce and by making them generally available increases the likelihood of scalpers buying them.
Recently, I attempted to purchase Nine Inch Nails tickets for a show. And due to the hellish experience that is modern ticket purchasing made possible by Ticketmaster, the show sold out immediately, yet plenty of tickets showed up immediately on Stub Hub.
I’ve been to concerts in the last couple years, mouse clicks lucking into tickets, where no accessible seating after the on sale. But when I got to the venue, these sections were nearly empty, with nobody sitting in them.
I’m not entitled to tickets, but I should have the honest ability can purchase tickets intended for those with limited options.
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, at Life is Sacred, found research on non-violent resistance campaigns.
Chenoweth and Stephan even discovered something so important here that it gets a name: the 3.5 Percent Rule.
Everywhere they looked where a nonviolent resistance campaign engaged the “active and sustained participation” of at least 3.5% of that nation’s population: they won.
See also the CIA’s Simple Sabotage: A Modern Field Manual for Detecting and Rooting Out Everyday Behaviors That Undermine Your Workplace.
Mike Davidson writes about the recent Southern California fires in a post titled, 47 Years Later, The Palisades Disappeared Overnight. It tells a story of growing up in a particular time and how Los Angeles overcame its smog epidemic. Plus, his father was a unique position to contribute as a meteorologist. What eventually did it? Everyone agreed it was a problem and people went along with the solutions.
When you fly into LA today and see what you think is smog, rest assured it is nothing compared to what we had in the ’80s. The one advantage this public health problem had though is that it was in your face every day. Everyone in LA felt it daily and supported their government’s efforts to solve the problem.
This was originally posted on reddit a while back, and I’ve been meaning to post it here.
The what
I wrote 52 short stories across 9 different genres that totaled over 52,000 words. My constraints were one short story every Sunday, at least 500 words, and I’d publish them on my personal website. I’d consider them as first drafts, some needing more work than others, some exist as scenes, and some serve as the start of a longer story. I gave myself the challenge in order “just write,†but also explore different characters, genres and ideas.
Success and learnings
In doing this, I now have a body of work, where I could (and will) return to and edit them to be excellent stories. And with this body of work, I can see what tics or habits I lean on. For example, I need to get better at showing emotion in a variety of ways, and my ingrained aversion to to-be verbs causes verb tense issues at times. Moreover, if I don’t have a clear vision of an ending, my endings get muddy and flat no matter what idea I had at the start.
In exploring ideas, I found fun in writing other genres and challenge in working to incorporate people different than my male, American, hetero self. The western I wrote about a bar tender recounting a story of a samurai in his saloon was one of the best, and I realized I could work with the conventions of the genre and still be able to execute; the same can be said of the fantasy stories I played with. And I made conscious decisions to write women, minorities, LGBT, in fantastic or mundane scenarios as normal, ordinary people. Did I do them justice? I don’t know. I’ll need to get feedback, especially for the story where a transwoman goes and buys a gun in reaction to an election.
Story telling may just be an exercise in empathy.
Ideas
Ideas came from all over:
And on and on…
I even managed to write three on my phone while traveling 35,000 feet up in the air. But I’ll be honest, there were days where I scraped my keyboard for words. One idea I’ve had for sometime revolves around the woman in white ghost story trope but at a whiskey distillery. I was miserable writing it—i wasn’t feeling well, the setup was off, and it needed to be at least 5,000-6,000 words to create the tension. It was my worst. I cheated with the end, writing, “everything burned, and he died.â€
I do intend to go back to that one and redo it.
Misc
Stats
Genre breakdown
| Genre | Count |
|---|---|
| Contemporary | 15 |
| Crime | 2 |
| Fantasy | 7 |
| Historical Fiction | 1 |
| Horror | 6 |
| Literary | 1 |
| Sci-fi | 15 |
| Supernatural | 2 |
| Western | 2 |
| Young Adult | 1 |
Emily White, an NPR intern, kicked off the discussion early in the week, stating she never made the transition from physical to digital consumption of music.
I never went through the transition from physical to digital. I’m almost 21, and since I first began to love music I’ve been spoiled by the Internet.
I am an avid music listener, concertgoer, and college radio DJ. My world is music-centric. I’ve only bought 15 CDs in my lifetime. Yet, my entire iTunes library exceeds 11,000 songs.
Then, Camper  Van Beethoven and Cracker founder, David Lowery, responds with a nearly 3,000 word essay regarding the ethics and philosophy of creating music (or art) and being compensated.
Rather, fairness for musicians is a problem that requires each of us to individually look at our own actions, values and choices and try to anticipate the consequences of our choices. I would suggest to you that, like so many other policies in our society, it is up to us individually to put pressure on our governments and private corporations to act ethically and fairly when it comes to artists rights. Not the other way around. We cannot wait for these entities to act in the myriad little transactions that make up an ethical life. I’d suggest to you that, as a 21-year old adult who wants to work in the music business, it is especially important for you to come to grips with these very personal ethical issues.
But Jonathan Coulton takes the idea further in a different direction, using Legos to speculate what may happen with physical goods if 3D printers proliferated.
Your kid loves Legos. He’s got an X-wing fighter kit that he’s super excited about, and as he’s putting it together, one of the little pointy laser turret pieces on the tips of the wings slips out of his hands and falls down the central air conditioning vent. No problem. You fire up the old internet, and you find www.legowarez.to, the small crazy place where all of the Lego nuts go to obsessively upload and catalog 3D scans of every lego piece that has ever existed. This site is ad supported, and some douchebag in Nigeria is getting rich off it. But you find the file for the piece you need, you download it, and a few minutes later you’ve printed out a replacement piece.
Jay Frank gets curious and uses Google Trends to seek out data about potential piracy.
Google, as the worldwide leader in search results, is a strong indicator of actual file trade demand. In fact, industry watchdog Moses Avalon argued such this week at New Music Seminar. Yet, when I went to look on Google Insights to see the level of demand for free music by David Lowery’s group Camper Van Beethoven, the message I get is, “Not enough search volume to show graphs.â€This basically means, from what I can gather, that less than 50 people per monthin the entire world are even showing intent to steal his music. Statisticians basically refer to this as essentially zero.
In the broader sense, creators deserve to be paid for their work, regardless of the medium or method of distribution. The transition to legal, digital services to do this is only a recent development. Upon discovering Spotify, friends marveled, “How is this legal? There’s so much.” But if there’s no demand for an artist’s work, irrelevancy seems a much steeper price despite whatever medium the art is in.
In the 10 minute video, Caine Monroy shows the arcade he built using discarded card board boxes and other supplies behind his father’s shop. It’s a fully realized vision of an arcade with games, a fun pass and prizes. He adapted materials and conformed them into something new, and in a way, it was a means of play to him, to create a mini-business.
Children like Caine should be nurtured. How to do this? Encourage interests in a playful manner. By this, get a child to describe what they’re doing or what they’ve done. Ask them about other ways to do things. Show them new experiences and how one experience can be combined with another. Creativity is all about making connections with disparate things or ideas and putting them into novel or different contexts.
If something isn’t wholly original, point out what you find interesting and ask what if questions. If a child is challenged by a what if question, step back and ask about their favorite activities and how those activities apply to the task at hand.
As a parent, it’s key to expose a child to different experiences. Early in life, reading to a child increases attention spans, curiosity, language skills to express themselves. Seek out field trips for hands on learning and showing them the world. Shy away from using rewards for creative acts–you want a child to develop a strong sense of self-motivation and restraint and to enjoy the process of being creative. Yes, celebrate and recognize the outcome of the creative work, but recognize what they had to do to get to the outcome. Always reframe a child’s failure as a learning experience for them. They can’t change what they did, but they can affect what they do in the future.
Here’s a detailed list of creativity for children.
Good Friday. Heading south on Bryant Irvin under a clear, blue sky. An LCD readout on the rearview mirror tells me it’s 84 degrees, and a rolled down passenger window catches the breeze. After I cruise through the green light at Overton, I change lanes to the right and the iPod fades into the next song, ‘Ho Hey’, by The Lumineers. As I pass a red Nissan Xterra, my grey Chevy Silverado surpasses 50,000 miles.