Kingdom of lies

The Future Is Like Pie #38

Lisa Maria Marquis
January 11, 2024

In January, the month the owls
Nest in, I am a witness & a small thing altogether. The Kingdom
Of Ingratitude. Kingdom of Lies. Kingdom of How Dare I.

—“Domestic Mysticism,” Lucie Brock-Broido

I’ve always liked January, as a concept. It never starts strong—I always struggle to get past my cyclic disappointment that the winter holidays have passed, and that they have (again! again!) failed to align with my desired weather patterns (let’s all blame Charles Dickens).

But beyond that, I like the word itself (smooth, clear, poetic), and I like its promise. It’s a month built entirely from hope and wool and potential, the cold blue sunrise of the year. I like mornings that way, too, and writing statements of work. I like performatively blanking the slates. Nothing has happened yet and everything is perfect.

On the other hand, sleet.

Down to business: You might have heard that Mailchimp is shutting down tinyletter, the service I use for this newsletter. I’m not yet sure where I’m headed, as a result—the nice thing about tinyletter, aside from its simplicity, was that it never cost me a penny (and didn’t actively platform fascists). Other newsletter services charge by subscriber numbers, and while this little group is quite small, it’s still large enough to trip those sensors. If I want to continue writing here, I need to pony up—which means being a little more disciplined, giving this writing a little more weight. I don’t love the potential added pressure, so I’m dragging my feet. I’ll work it out soon; hopefully we’ll all migrate quickly and quietly.

Different business: Please wear a mask. Don’t be weird about it, just wear it. Right now we’re experiencing “the second highest wastewater levels since BA.1, the first Omicron wave in January 2022,” and absolutely fuck no one is doing anything about it, institutionally speaking. That means risk-mitigation is entirely up to individuals. That’s you. Wear a mask. Do it for me. Please.

And now, your links:

Fascinated by this look at the connections between the Boston Tea Party and the British Empire’s destruction of eighteenth-century India (from Deb Chachra and Robert Martello):

Contemporary estimates put the death toll of the Great Bengal Famine of 1770 at between seven and ten million people – between a quarter and a third of the population. […]By the time of the Boston Tea Party, the Massachusetts colonists had been discussing, for years, this brutal demonstration of what can happen when a community lacks a voice in their own governance. They learned that even in times of direst need, a colony’s domestically produced resources can be extracted by outsiders in the name of greater profits. Diwani without nizamat is, quite literally, taxation without representation.

Josh Gondelman wrote us all a plucky little pep talk about being tired, perfectly timed for the turn of the year:

“Good tired” is not a medical term, but we can probably all identify it. It’s the feeling of having spent your energy on something worthwhile, whether that’s cooking dinner for your family, working at a job you don’t hate, or playing a few hours of pickleball. (I assume everyone who mentions pickleball, a game I’d never heard of until 2022, is being paid by some unseen benefactor to do so, and so I used that as my example for an athletic activity in hopes of receiving a fat check from the pickleball lobby, a.k.a. Big Little Tennis.)

A too-true, too-short rant about architectural renderings (some lessons here for tech and design, I think):

[T]his obsession with the perfect image has resulted in a detachment from reality in architecture, with the idea itself, the image of architecture, taking precedence over the realism or feasibility of the vision in reality. […U]nreal renderings are a way for architects not only to persuade skeptics but also to deceive themselves.

I adored this little Danny Lavery essay on work, butcher shops, precarity, and resilience (there’s no one quote that captures all of that at once, but here’s a start):

I thought I’d make a pretty good butcher’s assistant for a few reasons: I like working in food service (especially behind a counter, where you can ritualize your interactions and test-drive the possibility of calling people “boss”), I find meat interesting, I don’t have any back problems yet, I enjoy wrapping things carefully in thick white paper, and I like working in a cold environment.

Ask a Manager with a doozy: “Men are hitting on my scheduling bot because it has a woman’s name”:

If anyone ever doubted that some men will take any opportunity to ask out a female-appearing person, absent any signs of her personality or any signs of interest from her … and in this case absent any clues about her whatsoever other than that her name signals she is equipped with female genitalia … here you go. Men, heal thyselves.

Fun for name nerds (it me): For DnD purposes, a tumblr user created “a d100 table of male names and a d100 table of female names, taken from 13th-century English records and trimmed to minimize names that were used within the last 140-odd years.” Perfect if you need to name a lot of NPCs, or if you just like to see what people were called in medieval Europe (Fulk! Huwelina! Orm! Bruncosta!).

Lately I’ve been donating to the Palestinian American Medical Association (PAMA), a charity supporting health care for Palestinians. Donations fund getting food, water, supplies, and medical teams to Gaza (as best they can, I suppose). And, related, keep calling your congressfolk to demand a ceasefire.

<3