Whenever folks are like “Dave, aren’t you worried about AI making your job obsolete?” I’ll just remember this crackerjack spam bot’s best attempt at closing the sale:
SPOILER ALERT: I’m an emphatically Jewish straight cis-gendered father who looks awful in long-sleeved T-shirts/crew-necked sweatshirts.
I guess Mac OS…thinks there is an equal likelihood that a user typing “bear” into the emoji search is looking for a fuzzy black man and a bear?🤣
see also: “bear,” i guess
A handful of seasonally-appropriate tales:
A classic monster story that’s also a quietly feminist story about predators. Short, but full of surprises nonetheless.
The first story in PseudoPod 798: Flash on the Borderlands LX: Words Like Violence
Loretta Lynn, a singer and songwriter whose rise from dire poverty in Kentucky coal country to the pinnacle of country music was chronicled in the best-selling memoir and movie “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” and whose candid songs gave voice to the daily struggles of working-class women, died Oct. 4 at her home in Hurricane Mills, Tenn. She was 90.…
[Lynn] was a teenage bride and mother, a country star and a grandmother by her early 30s.
obituary in the Washington Post
This is, in lyrics and delivery and bear-trap smile, 100% the song of a 30-year-old grammy who is done taking shit. May she watch over all of us, and forever be our guide.
I just sorta love everything about this. Such delight!
“How Lizzo came to play a president’s crystal flute on a D.C. stage”
This is a “frog boil” story, and may in fact be the perfect frog boil story. If you’re woke-ish, then it is pretty clearly a climate change story. But if you’re on the political right, it may actually seem to much more obviously be an immigration story. It could be a cautionary tale about the dangers of group think (although its up to the reader to determine of its more about anti-mask group think, QAnon group think, CRT group think) or privilege or income disparity.
However you read it, the message is the same: It’s a warning against repeating the same old prayer that humans have repeated prior to disaster for Millenia:
I guess it’s happening, but let it happen in some other neighborhood in some other town far away, above someone else’s roof and out of my sight.
Anywhere but here.
Anywhere else.
Also, absolutely terrific monster-of-the-week. So worth your ears and eyes: PseudoPod 819: “Balloon Season” by by Thomas Ha
