Shield and shelter

The Future Is Like Pie #51

Lisa Maria Marquis
February 27, 2025

❝

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested
but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was
in my bed, around my bed America

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

—Ilya Kaminsky, “We Lived Happily During the War”

Not to talk about the weather, but the weather’s been bad. It’s been cold in New England, of course, but we’ve also had a brutal pattern of snow, sleet, rinse, repeat—the landscape has built up alternating layers of snow, mud, and ice, like geologic striations, or a really cold sandwich.

On one particularly odd day this month, the falling snow turned to rain, which turned the top layer of it all into slush, which then flooded huge portions of the sidewalks and streets—then the temperature dropped so rapidly that the slush froze mid-current, perfectly preserving tire treads and boot prints. Everything became jagged and glassy, not a single even surface on which to step.

Live footage of real Bostonians in their natural habit

For me—someone who has to walk her dog several times a day, regardless of the conditions—this has made the past ten days somewhat hellish. Nothing feels safe. I don’t trust my own feet, or rather, the ground underneath them. I’m hypervigilant, fixated on the few inches in front of my toes, gauging its slickness, its solidity, its lies. I’ve learned which houses reliably shovel and which don’t, which fence posts will support me when I slip. And there are so few other pedestrians out—just me and the dog and these fraught, exhausting, tiny steps.

I am absolutely only talking about the weather.

Ice has a way of making me feel helpless, forever at its mercy, nothing to be done, endless winter. But no weather pattern lasts forever. These last few days, the ice has started to melt; the walks have gotten a little easier. It’s not spring yet, but it will be.

“Hope Is Important, But So Is Curiosity”

This piece from Charlie Jane Anders, about “curiosity as the opposite of depression, in much the same way that hope is the opposite of despair,” really resonates with me. The process and outputs of knowledge-gathering (in a similar vein to Celine Nguyen’s “research as leisure activity”) can be such a balm:

It sounds counterintuitive, but learning something about the history of ship-making or ancient funeral practices can be better for my fighting spirit than yet another resistance newsletter. Once I've soothed my mind and remembered that this world is huge and full of weird facts, past and present, I have a little bit more perspective and can get back into the fight, in whatever way I'm capable of. I guess I'm talking about self-care, at least in part.

“Ursula’s list”

I swear this newsletter isn’t just an Erin Kissane fan page. (So what if it is.) (It is.) But she’s just kicked off a series deep-dive into Ursula Franklin’s philosophy of redemptive technologies, which I’ve been obsessed with for years. This first piece sets the stage and digs into the concept of justice:

I keep returning to Franklin’s formulation of justice as care: “giving people opportunities, providing education, providing a space for them to show what they are capable of, or providing that bit of shield and shelter needed for them to come into their own.” The chance to build and repair and maintain conditions for life online that can help build and repair and maintain life offline is the whole game. It’s what most of us came for and stayed to work on.

“We…need worldbuilding?”

I loved The Traitor Baru Cormorant, but rarely recommend it, the same way I rarely recommend The Parable of the Sower—the literary merits are astounding, but the world it describes is too brutally current. But you might read this blog post from author Seth Dickinson; it’s about worldbuilding in fantasy writing, but its core lesson is applicable to UXD, to policymaking, to living:

If you stick to your easy automatic tendencies, you’ll produce sexist, racist writing—because our culture still has sexist, racist tendencies, tendencies we internalize, tendencies we can now even measure and quantify in a laboratory. And you’ll produce narrow writing, writing that generalizes a particular historical moment, its flavors and tongues, to a fantasy world that should be much broader and more varied. Don’t assume that the world you see around you, its structures and systems, is inevitable.

Lightning round

I would describe the best game I’ve played in a while as “Monument Valley with transliteration puzzles” [Chants of Sennaar]
My latest tumblr obsession: fyblackwomenart [tumblr]
God, I really love donuts [Mike Monteiro]
Which chicken is more sincere? [Erika Hall]
An excellent look at navigation design and the trade-offs of “directories” versus “neighborhoods” [Dan Brown]
The amazing Designing Content Authoring Experiences is out and available for purchase! [Greg Dunlap]

Civic engagement round

Oh, HELL yes, federal workers [We the Builders]
On “the intentional weaponization of trauma” happening in the federal government right now [Rachel Dietkus on LinkedIn]
“Fight those battles at home, on your own turf, with much more immediate impact.” [tumblr]
Helpful scripts for calling right-wing officials [tumblr]
Why public comments matter to federal regulations, and how to participate [Public Comment Project]

February’s cause

This month I’m donating to the Sylvia Rivera Law Project, which works “to increase the political voice and visibility of low-income people and people of color who are transgender, intersex, or gender non-conforming.”

Movie magic

Have you heard about White Meat? It’s the zombie movie that my friend David Dylan Thomas is hoping to make—about the bodies of enslaved people rising from the grave to devour white people—and I’m psyched for it. Help fund his proof-of-concept in its last week on Kickstarter—I wanna see this thing get made!